Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rev_bird 4157 days ago
Time to break out some napkin math:

627,000 malaria deaths * 90% in sub-Saharan Africa[1] = 564,000 malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.

564,000 deaths / population of Africa (~815 million) = 69.2 African malaria deaths per 100,000 people.

--

About 32,743 U.S. flu deaths per year, recently.[2]

32,742 deaths / population of U.S. (~316 million) = 10.4 U.S. flu deaths per 100,000 people.

--

It looks like, by these numbers, that malaria in Africa is about 6.7 times as deadly as the flu in America.

[1] http://www.who.int/malaria/media/world_malaria_report_2013/e...

[2] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/08/26/129456941/annual-...

1 comments

Not to mention, we can eliminate an extreme majority of malaria deaths, and we can do so at a relatively low cost per person. Something the parent is ignoring entirely.