Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
What we're talking about here is the case fatality rate, which is the ratio of people diagnosed with an illness to the people who die.
So let's take a fictional disease, dragonpox from Harry Potter.
If 100 people were diagnosed with that and 30 of them died, then the fatality rate, the CFR, would be 30%.
And that's the average for the whole outbreak, but the fatality rate varies for each individual country.
It's ranging at the moment from 42% in Sierra Leone to 66% in Guinea.
And yet, if you catch Ebola, it is still quite likely to kill you.
Now, the World Health Organisation says that the scale of this outbreak has been vastly underestimated, and that also sounds alarming.
But that's actually not what they said at all.
They said there could be up to four times as many people in some areas, in areas of intensive transmission, so urban centres, basically, where it's hard to keep up with the numbers.
So there may be more than the recognised 3,000 cases, but probably hundreds more rather than many thousands.
And the WHO said that the total number of cases could reach 20,000 in the next six to nine months.
Again, that's been widely reported.
But that would be only if the outbreak wasn't controlled, and of course they're working hard to do just that, control it.
Which is a key question, because the deadliest disease in the world isn't much of a worry if it's impossible to catch it.
And a highly contagious disease can kill a lot of people, even if most people who catch it pull through.
Thankfully, 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 bodily fluids, which makes it much harder to get.
American billionaire Donald Trump, displaying great self-confidence in his medical credentials, tweeted that infected medical staff shouldn't be allowed to return to the US and that the US must immediately stop all flights from Ebola-infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our borders.
Health experts are far more concerned with the spread of Ebola in poor countries.
Right now, the focus is on dealing with the outbreak on the ground in Africa, rather than the possibility that it might spread to the UK.
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