Saturday, September 6, 2014
Ebola is the big health news right now. But it's not the biggest killer. Malaria killed 627,000 people in 2012 alone (World Health Organization, http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/en/), and that's after intense efforts to control it, it's supposedly down by 45%, and the fact that malaria is treatable. But still, 627,000 people died of malaria in one year. I find that number shocking. Ebola has killed less than 1/600th the number in the 6 months of this outbreak.
So, I'm not sure why ebola gets all the press. Maybe because ebola can travel to the US easier than malaria? So that scares us more?
But ebola is a lot easier to avoid than malaria:
1. Don't eat bats or monkeys
2. Don't touch body fluids from strangers.
3. Don't touch body fluids from family members who have done 1. or 2.
You want to be scared for a more logical reason? How easy would it be to dump some ebola virus into your local reservoir?
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