Question: What is the most dangerous bacteria and virus?

Jordan Kirby answered on 14 Mar 2019: last edited 14 Mar 2019 10:04 am

So this can be looked at in 3 different ways (we will explore all 3 😛):
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Most dangerous once infected (without treatment)
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Most dangerous once infected (with treatments)
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And finally what causes the most deaths per year across the world.
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So firstly most dangerous virus and bacteria if you dont recieve treatment:
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Virus: Rabies lyssavirus – The virus that causes rabies. This is easily treatable if you get to a hospital after a bite… However if left untreated it is one of the few diseases that has an almost 100% fatality rate (there has only ever been one documented survivor of the disease!
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Bacteria: -Yersinia pestis: The bacteria that caused the black death! This disease has 3 different ways it can cause disease in humans; bubonic (infection of the tissue), pneumonic (infection of the lungs) and septicemic (infection of the blood). Now all three of these have very high fatality rates if left untreated but it is septicemic plague which has an almost 100% fatality rate if left untreated. It also kills super fast (sepsis can kill in hours unless medically treated! Bacterial sepsis remains one of the biggest killers in hospitals!).
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So now lets move onto the diseases that are still dangerous even if you recieve treatment. These are often untreatable or have unreliable treatments.
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Virus: Zaire ebolavirus – The virus which causes the viral hemorrhagic disease Ebola. Im sure you expected this to turn up on the list. So ebola has varying fatality rates depending on the strain and the support that the patients recieve (ive seen cases state values as high as 85% or as low as 45%). Regardless our treatments of this disease are limited and incredibly expensive and dont have the greatest success rates.
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Bacteria: Bacillus anthracis – The disease that causes antrax. Like plague the disease has 3 different ways it can cause disease: Cutaneous (infection of the skin), Intestinal (infection of your gut) and pulmonary (infectionof the lungs). The pulmonary variety is the most dangerous and the most rare form of the disease. If you recieve treatment in its first stage you can treat it. However this is almost never identified as the disease in its first stage has the same symptoms of a cold/flu and becayse of this it often moves into its second stage which has a really high fatality rate of around 80%!
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So finally lets have a look at deaths attributed to diseases world wide. This is important to look at because although things like ebola and plague have really bigh fatality rates they are often localised and dont cause alot of infections each year. However the ones we will look at now cause alot more deaths globally.
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Virus – Influenza Virus : The Flu, surprising right? Each year the seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands of people and in the past has caused world wide outbreaks (the most infamous being the spanish flu after the firdt world war which infected over a third of the worlds population and killed between 50 and 100 million people!).
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Bacteria – Vibrio cholerae: The pathogen that causes Cholera the waterbourne disease that infects usually between 1-4 million people annually and kills 50% of those who cannot get treatment. Its an old disease that humans have been suffering from for aslong as we have needed water.
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Hopefully that answers your question (sorry that it was so long!) If you have any more questions please let me know down in the comments! ☺