James Fletcher
speaker
208 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2014
last heard Sep 2014
James Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This figure of up to 90% comes from the World Health Organisation.
It's a fairly simple measure called the case fatality rate.
That's the number of people who die from an illness divided by the number of people who are diagnosed with that illness.
Now, we asked Maimuna Majumda, she's a biostatistician and epidemiologist at MIT University in the United States, what the WHO mean when they talk about a fatality rate of up to 90%.
No.
So at the moment, the fatality rate varies a lot between the Western African countries that are affected.
The worst affected country is Guinea, which was the first where the Ebola showed up.
That's got a fatality rate of around 73%.
whereas in Liberia it's lower at 55%, in Sierra Leone it's 41%, and in the most recently affected country, Nigeria, it's much smaller at 11%, although they've only seen a handful of cases there, so it's not really possible to draw firm conclusions about how deadly the outbreak there is or could be.
Yes, Maimuna Majumde explains what can cause those variations in the fatality rates.
And just a reminder that that all-time figure for Ebola is around 60 to 65%.
So that shows that Ebola still kills the majority of people who contract it, and it is a nasty disease.
Yeah, that's one of the key things here because we've been talking so far about how deadly the disease is once you've got it.
But this case fatality rate doesn't tell you whether it's easy to get the disease, how communicable it is.
And it turns out Ebola is nowhere near as contagious as things such as flu or measles, for example.
They both spread easily through the air, whereas Ebola is transmitted through contact with body fluids, which makes it much harder to get.
So if we look at something like measles, the case fatality rate there, in places where nutrition and health care are poor...
is around 10%, which is a lot lower than Ebola.
But measles is far more deadly.
According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, more than 120,000 people died from it in 2012, and most of them were children under the age of five.
Showing 101–120 of 208 · page 6 of 11
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