One glimmer of good news: The fatality rate appears to be not as high as it was in previous outbreaks of Ebola virus.
These numbers are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. In Kathmandu valley, the fatality rate appears higher than in other areas of the meizoseismal zone in Nepal (Fig. 2).
Utilizing published observational reports of patients with confirmed 2009 H1N1 infection and those admitted into intensive care units worldwide, the incidence, severity and case fatality rates following infection appear to differ between males and females, but often are age-dependent and vary between countries.
However, these fatality rates from these urban centers appear better correlated when plotted relatively to the building destruction rate (Fig. 5), suggesting a possible causal relationship between the fatality rate and the population density.
The case fatality rate in tuberculosis appears to be lower in Jews than in others, for example, and gonorrhea seems to be a less serious disease in blacks than in whites.
Moreover, the lower fatality rate in hamsters appears to more accurately reflect the fatality rate associated with human HPS.
This also appeared from case fatality rates which were lower than those from outside the USA.
Other complications that are primarily medical diseases in pregnancy, such as cardiac disease, occur rarely but appear to have high case fatality rates.
Indeed, those regions appear as outliers, far beyond average fatality rates, even when considering separately the most urban areas and their vicinity (Fig. 4).
Studies of the genetic changes that make the H5N1 virus more transmissible in mammals including the two papers now under review by Nature and Science are "in a category of their own," Keim says, because of the pandemic risk and H5N1's fatality rate in humans, which appears to be very high.
