The five deadliest infectious diseases in the world.

Now do your self a favor, put away any food you might have nearby you

and if you have a dog you might want to move it into another room.

You might be tempted to say the monstrous bastards

I'm about to talk about are the deadliest organisms in the world

but that wouldn't really be true,

because of all of the diseases that you're going to hear about today are caused by viruses

and as you know viruses are just protein covered scumbags full of nucleic acid

so they're not generally considered living things

but still you got to hand it to them viruses have probably been around for at least 10's of millions of years

and have managed to make a great living by ripping off our DNA like they're the fricking pirate bay

and using it to copy themselves and pretty much master our asses for as long as there have been warts.

But I'm not talking about warts here, guys, it's much worse than that. I'm talking about the diseases with the highest known case fatality rates

which is how experts measure the deadliness of a disease

the percentage of people diagnosed with it who end up dying from it

Remember the Spanish flu? 1917 to 1918, killed like 30 million people world wide and basically changed the course of modern history

That was a strain of a virus called H1N1 and it had a case fatality rate of like 10 to 20 percent

Viruses I'm talking about are so much deadlier by comparison that Spanish flu is not even worth calling in sick for.

Take for instance Nipah which has an average case fatality rate of about fifty percent

It's named for a town in Malaysia were it was discovered in 1999 among pig farmers

Seems a bunch started coming down with severe respiratory problems and inflammation of the brain that caused

hallucinations and seizures and not the good kinds...

Wait, there's good kinds of seizures?

Outbreaks soon followed in India and Bangladesh, this time among people who had eaten fruit that was tainted by bats that carried the virus

The death rate in some of these out breaks was 100 percent and there are no treatments or vaccines for the virus

But what's really pants-poopingly terrifying about Nipah is that it soon proved to be easily transmissible among humans

no pigs or bats or pig-bats required.

In 2001 there was an outbreak in the town of Siliguri in India and seventy-five percent of those cases were traced back to people who had visited the local hospital

Just by being in that building, they got it.

But hey, that doesn't affect you, right? Because, odds are, you're not a pig farmer and you're also probably not watching from your home in Siliguri

Well, no doubt you've heard of H5N1. The virus formally known as "bird flu" has been making the rounds mainly in Asia and Europe where it's often fatal to birds

Luckily, it's rarely contracted by people and it's not very good at jumping from person to person until now

You may remember a while back when I told you about how scientists genetically engineered bird flu to make it contagious among ferrets

and that's important because ferrets essentially have the same immune system as humans. Don't ask me why

It's assumed that these new strains are contagious to us as well which kinda sucks because the World Health Organization says

that H5N1 kills at least fifty-four percent of the people who get it usually from respiratory problems

Now, there is a vaccine for the strain that's out in the world right now, but at least in the US, it's been stockpiled by the government

and hasn't been made available by the public yet

As for the strains that were made to be made to be contagious between mammals they are currently kept under lock and key

in labs in Wisconsin and the Netherlands hopefully big locks with thumb print and retinal scan and voice activated.

and some of the scientists who monkeyed with the virus

have said they've developed a vaccine

at least for the strains that they've invented

so that's great

they can release it on the world and then sell the vaccine

that'll be great business for them

"Now, Hank," you're saying,

"I'm not a Malaysian bat handler,

and I've already stocked my pantry enough skittles and diet sierra mist to get me through the bird flu pandemic."