Question: What is the most dangerous virus ever?

Ditte Hedegaard answered on 19 Jun 2014:

Hi,

That is a really interesting question. There are a lot of different viruses in the world and luckily not all of them are deadly. I’m not sure which virus is the most dangerous one, but the family of flu viruses are known for being particular nasty mainly because it is so easily transferred between people and because it is difficult to cure and vaccinate for. The most famous flu virus is the Spanish flu, which killed about 50.000.000 people world-wide between 1918 and 1919. Usually the flu viruses only kills young and old people, but this flu virus did not spare anyone and both healthy and weak people died from the infection. The symptoms of the infection were headache, fever, coughing, and tiredness and usually the patient would die a few hours after having showed the first symptoms. Luckily we got ride of the virus and today it only exists in some high security laboratories.

Another nasty virus is the ebola virus, which cause a disease called haemorrhagic fever. Haemorrhagic fever means that the patient will start bleeding everywhere in the body and at some point the patient will die of blood lost. The virus is very rare in humans and those that are infected usually get the virus from infected wild monkeys and fruit bats, so we are pretty safe here in UK.