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
So that's about 330 deaths every day, far more than are dying from Ebola.
Yeah, at this point I think we've pretty definitely left the world of rational calculation of risk.
To put this in context, although the virus is still spreading in West Africa and more people are dying, it's considered pretty unlikely that there will be intercontinental outbreaks of the disease.
Dr Adam Kacharski is an infectious disease epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
That isn't to say that there's no risk of people with Ebola arriving in other countries.
It's just that it's very, very small and the chances of them starting an outbreak and spreading the disease are even smaller.
We asked Maimuna Majumda from MIT to just spell out how difficult it would be for that to happen.
In the US or Europe, for example, that means isolation in high-quality medical facilities.
But that may not be possible in other countries in West Africa, which means that the chances of the outbreak transferring to a new country there are higher.
It does, but if you're in doubt, you can do a quick sanity check by searching an online news aggregator for lightning deaths, and if you do, you'll see that people are indeed being killed all the time around the world.
But getting a more accurate number is not so easy.
There are only about 20 countries who keep an accurate track of lightning fatalities.
In the UK, for instance, we know that up to 60 people are hit by lightning each year and, on average, around three are killed.
So we have those statistics, but lightning's a lot more prevalent in Asia, South America and Africa, where billions of people live, and we have very sketchy data on lightning deaths in those places.
So where does the figure of 24,000 come from?
Because it's quite widely cited.
It is a figure you hear a bit, and the number comes from a conference paper published in 2003.
The authors are two lightning experts who tried to come up with a reasonable way to estimate global deaths.
The challenge is that while the good data comes from industrialised countries, lightning's more dangerous in less developed places.
So what we're looking for is a place with rich country statistics, but poor country lifestyles.
Showing 121–140 of 208 · page 7 of 11
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