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Meningitis biggest killer

A few years ago I wrote several books for Enslow Publishers in New Jersey for a series called Diseases and People.

A few years ago I wrote several books for Enslow Publishers in New Jersey for a series called Diseases and People.

I covered meningitis, arthritis, hemophilia and Ebola. My most recent book for Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist, also talks about Ebola, and some of the scientists who travel to the sites of outbreaks to help with containment efforts.

Ask someone on the street to name a particularly deadly disease, and there’s a good chance he’ll say, “Ebola.”

Yet of the diseases I wrote about, the biggest killer by far is meningitis, the bacterial form of which kills some 170,000 people annually, according to the World Health Organization.

And if you want even bigger killers, in sub-Saharan Africa alone tuberculosis kills some 5,000 people daily, and yearly in that region malaria kills 700,000 and simple diarrhea 900,000.)

Ebola has captured the public imagination, however, because unlike most diseases, it’s gotten a foothold in pop culture, through books like Richard Preston’s 1994 best-seller The Hot Zone and the 1995 movie Outbreak.

I admit it also captured my imagination as I wrote my own book, not least because Ebola (which, by the way, is named after a river near Yambuku, Democratic Republic of the Congo, site of the first recognized outbreak), begins with fever, weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat — in other words, “flu-like symptoms.” Which I experienced while I was writing the book, since I was, after all, writing in Saskatchewan in the winter. Oh, sure, I knew intellectually I didn’t have Ebola, but still . . . .

The symptoms get a lot worse than that, of course. Eventually, vomiting, diarrhea and rash develop, the kidneys and liver may stop functioning, and, in fatal cases, uncontrollable internal and external bleeding begins, resulting in the vomiting of blood and bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and other orifices.