Besides the lethality of the disease, we must consider how debilitating it is. Read what it's like to have Malaria.<p><a href="http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-Malaria-Feels-Like-Mosquito-Week" rel="nofollow">http://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-Malaria-Feels-Like-Mos...</a><p>Imagine feeling like that and trying to go to school, work, or take care of your family. It would be impossible. It's undoubtedly contributed to the lack of development in most of Africa.
So, in indonesia (bill gates recently came here) mosquitos really thrive in all regions. One of the most common and dangerous disease caused by them are (known locally as) "Demam Berdarah" with the literal translation is "Bloody Fever", i don't know if it is the same with the "dengue fever" stated in the article (i have a bad English). This disease is very dangerous especially in rainy season, when there are very many water puddle everywhere and the mosquitos breed. Sometimes hospitals have a very tough time here when the patients start flowing in a very large volumes. So i am grateful to bill gates for giving a grant for solving this problem
Last month I spent 2 weeks in Rwanda with my wife & daughters, visiting two friends who have been there for about a year. One of them has also spent a lot of time in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa.<p>Rwanda is land-locked and largely high-altitude, so malaria is not nearly so prevalent there, but it's still around.<p>It's already preventable -- we came with a sufficient supply of antimalarial pills, but they're so expensive it's obviously not a solution. We got yellow fever vaccinations before coming -- that was a no-brainer -- and we actively avoided mosquito bites, esp. for the little ones. My friend who has traveled widely in Africa doesn't take anti-malarials -- too pricey -- has gotten malaria, once, and it put him in the hospital for a couple of days.<p>He says many of the people he knows have had it, multiple times -- it's just a fact of life, and it sucks, but (probably) you'll live, and then have some protection against getting it again.<p>Gates talks about it as being debilitating -- apparently it's not always so bad, if you've had it before (and people talk about having "a touch of the malaria"!), but generally he's on the mark about the costs.
Wow, 50,000 snake deaths per year!<p>Living in Europe, I've never seen snakes except in a zoo.<p>How do you avoid them in a country with snakes? Can they pop up anywhere out of nowhere?
Not to be That Guy, but millions and millions of these deaths were preventable. The UN vote to effectively ban DDT has got to be one of the worst public health disasters in history. It is sickening.<p><a href="http://www.fightingmalaria.org/article.aspx?id=1862" rel="nofollow">http://www.fightingmalaria.org/article.aspx?id=1862</a><p><a href="http://perc.org/articles/legacy-ddt-ban" rel="nofollow">http://perc.org/articles/legacy-ddt-ban</a><p><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat-malaria/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-use-to-combat-...</a><p><a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15583-ddt-breeds-death" rel="nofollow">http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15583-dd...</a>
Same link and same title? I'm confused <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7665106" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7665106</a>
For comparison, wikipedia's list of causes of death ranked by frequency:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate#Causes_ranked_by_frequency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...</a>
Not sure where he got 10 wolf deaths per year. The average number of wolf deaths per century is less than that. Not the most relevant comment I suppose, but it makes me curious about his data collection process.
One of the key innovations in the development of the Panama Canal was the fighting of malaria/yellow fever. Without understanding this, the canal wouldn't have been built, and Panama would probably look a lot more like Nicaragua than like Hong Kong.<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/panama-fever/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-...</a>
Cows ought to be on that list as well. They kill 10-20 people per year in the US alone.
<a href="http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-cows/" rel="nofollow">http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/dangerous-cow...</a>
It's funny[0] that "Number of deaths" = "Number of people killed by animals". Perhaps if humans allowed that the deaths other animals is also of consequence we'd have a healthier relationship with nature. It's ranting about your home being destroyed by a hurricane, especially since you just rebuilt it after last years hurricane. Deaths by malaria and the destruction caused by hurricanes always terrible, but we need to look into mitigating such harm both by working with and against nature (which we are a part of, so I take issue a little bit even making that distinction, but, for the sake of discussion).<p>[0] funny = sad
What about the Photonic Fence that Bill Gates funded (<a href="http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=6738" rel="nofollow">http://intellectualventureslab.com/?page_id=6738</a>)?<p>I think it was criticized because it required electrical power to run and that would have been a no go in sub-Saharan Africa but I imagine it would work great everywhere else.
In a list that's supposed to point out "unexpected" killers, snakes are, interestingly, far and away the deadliest of the animals you'd actually think of when someone says "dangerous animals".
What about a horse? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they caused more human injuries and deaths than many other "dangerous" animals.... or maybe I'm remembering wrong.
Mosquitos are like heart attacks: they kill thousands/millions but they are boring so nobody care.<p>Sharks are like terrorists: they kill just some dozens but are super scary.
I would like to see the exact same graph but having instead as value the humans killed per unit of the animal. I doubt if the mosquito would be on top.
Pretty misleading I'd say.. Malaria kills people, not mosquitos, mosquitos have nothing to do with Malaria. Would be like saying rats are deadly because they carried the plague.<p>Also I interact with humans every day and I'm still alive.<p>I understand where it's coming from, but it's more of a historical post-factum analysis rather than a indication of which animals you should stay away from.
Maxing out my pedantry score, the actual answer is "humans" followed by "snakes". Mosquitos themselves are not dangerous, and malaria parasites are not animals.
"[...] malaria [...] threatens half of the world’s population and causes billions of dollars in lost <i>productivity</i> annually."<p>billions of dollars in lost productivity?!?!?<p>NOTE: Not in healthcare. Because there's no health-care Central Africa where malaria does the biggest damage. It causes <i>billions of dollars in lost productivity</i>. Now we need to cure it.
> What makes mosquitoes so dangerous? Despite their innocuous-sounding name—Spanish for “little fly”—they carry devastating diseases.<p>Spanish for "little fly" could be "mosquita", a diminutive of "mosca" (fly). Mosquito is the spanish term for mosquito. While mosquito and mosca share the same latin origin "musca" i dont think any spanish speaker will understand mosquito as little fly.<p>Just a nitpick in case you were going to amaze someone with magazine learned spanish terms.