Reuters) - More than 1,900 people have died in the world's worst outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, the head of the World Health Organization said on Wednesday, marking a major acceleration in fatalities from just over 1,500 last week.
Margaret Chan told a news conference in Washington that 3,500 confirmed or probable cases of Ebola have been reported in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia as of this week. The death toll from this outbreak is now higher than in all the previous epidemics since the disease was first detected in 1976.
The less lethal it is the more likely hood that it will spread from my understanding.
The trade-off hypothesis suggests that there is a trade off between how long the virus or other pathogen is able to persist in its host and the rate at which the virus or other pathogen can be transmitted. The trade off hypothesis suggests that virulence will evolve to a level at which virulence and transmission is balanced so as to maximize the spread of the virus.
Viral lines with the higher enforced rate of infectious transmission evolved higher virulence and higher rates of virus production. These results support the trade-off model for the evolution of virulence.