• Question: what is the top 10 most deadly bacteria!!!!!!! lol :)

    Asked by qwertyasdf to Alison on 13 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by dimyana.
    • Photo: Alison Graham

      Alison Graham answered on 13 Jun 2012:

      Great question but it’s really hard to rank bacteria according to which are most deadly! Whether or not a bacterium kills you depends a lot on your age, how healthy you are, if you have any other infections or diseases, etc. Having said that, the following bacteria are definitely really bad: Yersinia pestis (causes plague), Bacillus anthracis (causes anthrax), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (causes TB), Neisseria meningitidis (causes meningitis), Vibrio cholerea (causes cholera). A major problem now is that a lot of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics meaning that is it becoming much harder to get rid of some infections.

Comments

  • Photo: Artem

    Artem commented on :

    Hi,

    There are several ways to rank bacteria in the dimension of risk to human health, however two major directions are fairly typical: (a) how likely is it that a patient with a particular infection will not survive (assuming that adequate medical attention is provided) and (b) which bacterial infection is responsible for the most deaths.

    The ‘really scary’ bacteria, while indeed scary and dangerous, actually kill only very few people worldwide since they’re exotic (and hopefully stay that way!). Cholera for instance is not all that scary – in fact in most cases if rehydration and other supportive treatment is started early enough then mortality rate is lower than 1%, *even without antibioticsMATOMO_URL On the other hand if adequate support is not given, then mortality of 25% (really, really bad!) is possible. Cholera outbreaks hit the hardest when support treatment is not available either because of a natural disaster, war, etc. or because local economic conditions are very bad.

    On the other hand the common bacteria are responsible for a lot of trouble:
    Botulism can incapacitate a person for weeks, and without mechanical respiration can kill up to 60% of its victims. Even with treatment, in adults botulism can lead to 30% mortality.

    Salmonella (nontyphoid!) is estimated to infect 200 million to 1.3 billion people worldwide and estimated to be responsible for the deaths of ~3 million people each year, ans Streptococcus-related deaths top a million each year. Even ‘good old E. coli’ (but I must add – not the laboratory strains of it) can be a huge problem. Tuberculosis is very nasty – and it can be hiding in a person, sometimes for years (!) without any visible symptoms. It is estimated to cause 1-2 million deaths each year.