• Question: how many people die from a parasite bite every hour

    Asked by Nikkita to Mark, Koi on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Nikkita
      This is a difficult question to answer because parasites don’t do the biting. Most bites come from flying insects, or ticks. They transmit the parasite. So if your question is how many people are killed by a parasitic infection then there are some estimates. Mostly these are very vague. The latest estimate for malaria puts the death rate at about 1200 per day, or 50 per hour

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Nikkita,
      Most parasites do not really bite but they live inside or outside their host stealing the resource like food, or damaging host body during their stay. It’s mainly these processes that eventually kill people. However though, some parasite infection, especially for parasitic worms, do not often lead to death unless a person is infected with a very high number, or infect for a very long time and symptoms exacerbate. Yet, even without dead, if the infection is high enough, people then have ill health and may live a less efficient life or even become disable. Because of these variations in the cost of parasite infection, there is also another measurement for parasite burden and it’s called DALY (disability-adjusted life year) which take not only death but also disability into accounts.

Comments

  • Photo: Franco

    Franco commented on :

    Perhaps it is worth clarifying in this context that ticks, mosquitoes, fleas, bedbugs, head lice, tsetse flies, and so on, are also parasites (so called ecto- or exoparasites), and they do bite, but as Mark and Koi indicated, the disease is not caused by the bite itself but by the parasites (or other infectious microorganisms) that they transmit. And you can also get disease transmission without biting, for example by conventional house flies, which are not parasites.