Firstly, what really are viruses?

With the world, still battling with the corona virus, we took it upon our self to actually, find out through our history, the long list of the most unforgiving , deadly and terrible viruses we have encountered and survived but firstly what really are viruses?

A virus is a microscopic infectious particle that consists of an RNA or DNA genome enclosed in a protein shell. It is not able to reproduce on its own: it can only make more viruses by entering a cell and using its cellular machinery.

When a virus infects a host cell, it removes its protein coat and directs the host’s machinery to transcribe and translate its genetic material. The hijacked cell assembles the replicated components into thousands of viral progeny, which can rupture and kill the host cell. The new viruses then go on to infect more host cells.

To learn more about viruses, kindly click the link below

https://www.jove.com/science-education/10821/what-are-viruses

10. ROTAVIRUS

Rotavirus is a virus that causes diarrhea and other intestinal symptoms. It’s very contagious and is the most common cause of diarrhea in infants and young children worldwide. If you look at a rotavirus through a microscope, it has a round shape. The Latin word for wheel is “rota,” which explains how the virus got its name.


Two vaccines are now available to protect children from rotavirus, the leading cause of severe diarrheal illness among babies and young children. The virus can spread rapidly, through what researchers call the fecal-oral route (meaning that small particles of feces end up being consumed).

Although children in the developed world rarely die from rotavirus infection, the disease is a killer in the developing world, where rehydration treatments are not widely available.

The WHO estimates that worldwide, 453,000 children younger than age 5 died from rotavirus infection in 2008. But countries that have introduced the vaccine have reported sharp declines in rotavirus hospitalizations and deaths.

https://www.webmd.com/children/guide/what-is-rotavirus#1

9. VARIOLA VIRUS, SMALL POX


In 1980, the World Health Assembly declared the world free of smallpox. But before that, humans battled smallpox for thousands of years, and the disease killed about 1 in 3 of those it infected. It left survivors with deep, permanent scars and, often, blindness.

Mortality rates were far higher in populations outside of Europe, where people had little contact with the virus before visitors brought it to their regions. For example, historians estimate 90% of the native population of the Americas died from smallpox introduced by European explorers. In the 20th century alone, smallpox killed 300 million people.

"It was something that had a huge burden on the planet, not just death but also blindness, and that's what spurred the campaign to eradicate from the Earth," Adalja said.

8. THE HIV


HIV is a virus that damages the immune system. Untreated HIV affects and kills CD4 cells, which are a type of immune cell called T cell.

Over time, as HIV kills more CD4 cells, the body is more likely to get various types of conditions and cancers.

HIV is transmitted through bodily fluids that include:

blood
semen
vaginal and rectal fluids
breast milk

An estimated 32 million people have died from HIV since the disease was first recognized in the early 1980s.

Powerful antiviral drugs have made it possible for people to live for years with HIV. But the disease continues to devastate many low- and middle-income countries, where 95% of new HIV infections occur. Nearly 1 in every 25 adults within the WHO African region is HIV-positive, accounting for more than two-thirds of the people living with HIV worldwide.

7. THE MARBURG VIRUS

Marburg virus disease (MVD), formerly known as Marburg haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans.
Rousettus aegyptiacus, fruit bats of the Pteropodidae family, are considered to be natural hosts of Marburg virus. The Marburg virus is transmitted to people from fruit bats and spreads among humans through human-to-human transmission.

The Marburg virus causes severe viral haemorrhagic fever in humans.
The average MVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 24% to 88% in past outbreaks depending on virus strain and case management. Scientists identified Marburg virus in 1967, when small outbreaks occurred among lab workers in Germany who were exposed to infected monkeys imported from Uganda. Marburg virus is similar to Ebola in that both can cause hemorrhagic fever, meaning that infected people develop high fevers and bleeding throughout the body that can lead to shock, organ failure and death.

The mortality rate in the first outbreak was 25%, but it was more than 80% in the 1998-2000 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as in the 2005 outbreak in Angola, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

6. THE HANTAVIRUS


Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) first gained wide attention in the U.S. in 1993, when a healthy, young Navajo man and his fiancée living in the Four Corners area of the United States died within days of developing shortness of breath. A few months later, health authorities isolated hantavirus from a deer mouse living in the home of one of the infected people. More than 600 people in the U.S. have now contracted HPS, and 36% have died from the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The virus is not transmitted from one person to another, rather, people contract the disease from exposure to the droppings of infected mice.

Previously, a different hantavirus caused an outbreak in the early 1950s, during the Korean War, according to a 2010 paper in the journal Clinical Microbiology Reviews. More than 3,000 troops became infected, and about 12% of them died.

While the virus was new to Western medicine when it was discovered in the U.S., researchers realized later that Navajo medical traditions describe a similar illness, and linked the disease to mice.

5. THE MERS - COV


Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) is a viral respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or MERS‐CoV) that was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause diseases ranging from the common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
Typical MERS symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath. Pneumonia is common, but not always present. Gastrointestinal symptoms, including diarrhoea, have also been reported. Some laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS-CoV infection are reported as asymptomatic, meaning that they do not have any clinical symptoms, yet they are positive for MERS-CoV infection following a laboratory test. Most of these asymptomatic cases have been detected following aggressive contact tracing of a laboratory-confirmed case.

Approximately 35% of reported patients with MERS-CoV infection have died.

The virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, sparked an outbreak in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and another in South Korea in 2015. The MERS virus belongs to the same family of viruses as SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, and likely originated in bats, as well. The disease infected camels before passing into humans and triggers fever, coughing and shortness of breath in infected people.

MERS often progresses to severe pneumonia and has an estimated mortality rate between 30% and 40%, making it the most lethal of the known coronaviruses that jumped from animals to people. As with SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, MERS has no approved treatments or vaccine.

4. THE EBOLA VIRUS



The first known Ebola outbreaks in humans struck simultaneously in the Republic of the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976. Ebola is spread through contact with blood or other body fluids, or tissue from infected people or animals.

The known strains vary dramatically in their deadliness, Elke Muhlberger, an Ebola virus expert and associate professor of microbiology at Boston University, told Live Science.

One strain, Ebola Reston, doesn't even make people sick. But for the Bundibugyo strain, the fatality rate is up to 50%, and it is up to 71% for the Sudan strain, according to WHO., these typically make the Ebola virus extremely deadly and dangerous.

The outbreak underway in West Africa began in early 2014 is the largest and most complex outbreak of the disease to date, according to WHO.

3. SARS - COV2, COVID-19


SARS-COV2 belongs to the same large family of viruses as SARS-CoV, known as coronaviruses, and was first identified in December 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The virus likely originated in bats, like SARS-CoV, and passed through an intermediate animal before infecting people.

Since its appearance, the virus has infected tens of thousands of people in China and thousands of others worldwide. The ongoing outbreak prompted an extensive quarantine of Wuhan and nearby cities, restrictions on travel to and from affected countries and a worldwide effort to develop diagnostics, treatments and vaccines.

The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, called COVID-19, has an estimated mortality rate of about 2.3%. People who are older or have underlying health conditions seem to be most at risk of having severe disease or complications. Common symptoms include fever, dry cough and shortness of breath, and the disease can progress to pneumonia in severe cases.

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2. SARS- COV


The virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, first appeared in 2002 in the Guangdong province of southern China, according to the WHO. The virus likely emerged in bats, initially, then hopped into nocturnal mammals called civets before finally infecting humans. After triggering an outbreak in China, SARS spread to 26 countries around the world, infecting more than 8000 people and killing more than 770 over the course of two years.

The disease causes fever, chills and body aches, and often progresses to pneumonia, a severe condition in which the lungs become inflamed and fill with pus. SARS has an estimated mortality rate of 9.6% more than SARS-COV2, and as of yet, has no approved treatment or vaccine. However, no new cases of SARS have been reported since the early 2000s, according to the CDC.

1. THE INFLUENZA, SPANISH FLU

When we did our comparisons, we knew there was no match for our number one, it had to be the one with the most mortality rate, the one which was birthed by WWI itself and at September 29, 2020, the global COVID-19 death toll topped 1 million people, and at November 17, the figure
went up to 1,332,470 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

Now we did our research and there are no accurate numbers for Spanish flu, but estimates range from 17 to 50 million people across the world, and there were possibly even more. The CDC says an estimated one-third of the world's population was infected with the virus, resulting in at least 50 million deaths.

Why did so many people die of Spanish flu was a question, our guesses were confirmed easily.

First of all, the state of supportive medical care in 1918-19 was primitive by today's standards. "Keep in mind that many deaths related to influenza are actually due to secondary bacterial infections, which today we treat with antibiotics, which were completely unavailable in 1918-19," Dr. Polsky explains. "Additionally, the state of ICU care with modern mechanical ventilation and ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. when blood is pumped through an artificial lung back into the bloodstream) were far off into the future."

pic 4. Spanish flu virus

pic3. An over crowded ward due to the flu

pic 2. Death toll spikes

pic 1. A warning to people not to spit carelessly

Dr. Narasimhan points out that no vaccine or antiviral agent was available. "We did not have the scientific advancement for vaccine development, which would have prevented transmission and decreased disease severity and mortality."

The backdrop of World War I was also hugely instrumental in the transmission of the virus that caused Spanish flu. "Military barracks usually have crowding and poor spatial separation, especially in winter months," Dr. Narasimhan says. "The movement of the troops during the war facilitated spread to other susceptible populations. Likewise, the economic circumstances likely caused crowding in winter months, poor ventilation, and congregation—all of which increased spread."



other notably dangerous viruses are

1. Lassa fever
2. Encephalitis virus
3. Dengue virus
4. The small pox
5. The Rabies
6. Viral Hepatitis

Please feel free to add yours, watch out for our next Top ten.

EBOLA VIRUS IS MORE DEADLIER THAN CORONA VIRUS

APC and PDP virus.

This Viruses has eaten Nigeria deeply

Even ordinary common cold virus can humble man... Virus, generally, is deadly.

Most of these viruses have existed for decades and yet no vaccines or 100% cure for them despite several decades of research. Yet Covid-19 virus that is not even up to 2 years has different vaccines available for it. May God continue to protect us.

BUBONIC plague

Nigervirus, bubuvirus,hungervirus etc
oluwa ma fi kankan se wa