Ebola mortality is highest among babies, finds study

Nine in 10 children aged under 12 months who contract Ebola virus disease will die from the infection, new analysis by the World Health Organization has shown.

The data, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, confirm what clinicians in the field have seen: that mortality is much higher among infants.1 However, what has surprised researchers is that death rates decline with age of children and then rise in adults.

Looking at a total of 7335 patients of all ages with Ebola virus disease, the researchers found that the case fatality rate was 89.5% among 86 children aged less than a year. This fell to 80.4% among those aged 1-2 …