• Question: What is the deadliest disease?

    Asked by anon-186280 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny, Catherine, Andy on 11 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Danny Ward

      Danny Ward answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      This really depends how you define deadly. The most deadly non-infectious disease in terms of numbers of deaths would be corony artery disease. The most deadly infectious-disease in terms of numbers could be defined as tuberculosis which has killed over a billion people over the past few centuries.
      .
      The most deadliest disease in terms of fatality rate is another way of defining it. The above diseases affect a lot of people but they don’t necessary kill everyone. With many infectious diseases, many people are lucky and survive due to good treatment and effective immune systems. The deadliest infectious disease would either the Marburg virus or Ebola. While it doesn’t affect loads of people like other diseases, those who are infected almost never survive.

    • Photo: Verity Hill

      Verity Hill answered on 11 Nov 2018:

      If you’re talking about deadly in terms of a percentage of how many people it kills when it infects them, I would say Rabies!
      Until very recently, if you developed symptoms you had a 100% chance of dying (compared to Ebola’s up to 90%). Recently a new treatment was proposed where the patient is put into a medical coma, and you just sort of hope that their immune system deals with it!
      I would also say flu and HIV are major contenders!

    • Photo: Andy Guise

      Andy Guise answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      2018 was 100 years since the end of the Great War, but it is also 100 years since the ‘spanish flu’ killed up to 100million people. It was a bit unfair to call it the spanish flu, as it didn’t come from Spain’ the Spanish authorities were just the first to publicly say that the flu was a massive problem. But it certainly killed a lot of people and had a massive influence on history.

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