Fatal Infection

Since AIDS is a non-acute illness that can’t be cured, you might want to say what period this % rate is over e.g. 5 years, 10 years…

Also, are people who die of TB & have AIDS counted in the TB category as well as the AIDS category, or just in AIDS (since many people with AIDS die from TB). Just wondering because if they were counted in TB, that would really skew the fatality rate. I don’t know how much people with AIDS are affected by other infections on the chart such as MRSA.

Is the data worldwide or from particular countries?

Seasonal flue is 9+%? That seems very high. I did a quick search and found e.g. < 0.1% – "similar to swine flu" etc. If your numbers are correct, I'm hiding under my bed :)

from your WHO source: “Worldwide, these annual epidemics result in about three to five million cases of severe illness, and about 250 000 to 500 000 deaths. ” There is a big difference between “cases of severe illness” and all cases. Severe illness refers to cases requiring hospitalization, which is a small minority of flu cases. So 9% of people who are hospitalized for seasonal flu die from it, which is not at all the same as 9% of all people who catch flu. Your number there is off by a factor of 100 at least.

Tuberculosis is the one that worries me most on that chart–SO many people infected worldwide and it is becoming increasingly drug resistant. Sure, it takes a long time to kill you, but quite unpleasant. Of course, if bird flu became easily transmissible while keeping its virulence we would certainly see a world-changing pandemic!

Thanks for compiling this! No pressure, but now we expect you to pull a Hans Rosling with your data! http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv.html

What is the size of the bubble dictated by? Is it just a redundancy of the percent? Is it noted somewhere that I missed?

Not sure what you mean when you talk about fatality due to MRSA. MRSA is incredibly widespread, and if 19 percent of people who contracted it died, we’d have a major plague on our hands. In many regions of the country, the majority of skin infections (i.e. boils) are MRSA. Maybe you are talking about fatality if someone develops some kind of systemic MRSA infection?

http://www.skininc.com/skinscience/physiology/28502439.html
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/guidelines/MRSA_tagged.pdf

is this for a specific year or for all time? I’m amazed bubonic plague isn’t higher if it is for all time, and also can’t believe bird flu’s so high!!

Wow, this has been tweeted and digged all over the universe without being amended or annotated. I hope these very misleading numbers don’t cause anyone to make bad choices about their health regarding swine flu.

as for bird flu being so high, it is currently not a major public health threat because it is not easily spread from person to person. There is only one known case of a person catching it from another person. If that flu were to mutate into a more contagious form, we would have a serious problem. We have no way to know the likelihood of that happening.

Nice…though you’d get even more dramatic results if you compared the total deaths from swine flu since it first broke out in the spring to those from heart disease, cigarettes, and car accidents in the same time period…

I think the fatality rate for bubonic plague is actually 90%. And people, the 9.4% fatality rate belongs to SARS, not seasonal flu!

I think a graph of case fatality rate (number of deaths out of number of sick people) vs. attack rate (how many get sick out of those exposed) would have been helpful. The number of people who have actually gotten bird flu is relatively miniscule – a few hundred in the whole world, ever, and it’s been found that many people exposed to sick poultry (e.g. workers in live bird markets) have antibodies against it, meaning they got infected but weren’t noticeably sick and cleared the infection. http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/country/cases_table_2009_09_24/en/index.html

I believe your graph is scaled incorrectly.

It seems you’re determining circle size by matching the radius to the fatality rate instead of the matching total area to fatality rate, so AIDS (untreated), with a 85% fatality rate is 22x the area of Bubonic Plague, instead of the expected 17x, and more than four thousand times as large as seasonal flu, instead of the expected 850x!

It’s possible I’ve mis-measured (admittedly I just used the webdeveloper extension’s ruler instead of zooming all the way in photoshop), but I think you just need to change how you’re determining circle size. The circle’s radius should be sqrt(desired final area * pi), instead of (desired area * scaling factor).

I could be totally off base here, but working with area in charts is tricky, and this is a common mistake.

Thanks for such a nice post. It is very informative post. I am wondering if I can share your article in the bookmarks of society

Should add that latent TB infection can reactivate years later and manifest as actual tuberculosis, which is why contact tracing, case-identification and treatment of even asymptomatic individuals is important.

@Belshazzar “If the y-axis metric is survival time outside the body, shouldn’t the two HIV datapoints have the same y-value?”

That one threw me off too. Looks like the chart draws the circle ABOVE the data point, rather than centered on the point.