"In parts of northeast Thailand, up to half of the population has been infected at some point"

That would mean that, out of every 100 people born, 75 would get infected, of which 50 die, leaving 25 who never got infected and 25 who survived.

That would mean this disease kills half of those born. Yet, this disease, which has visible symptoms, isn't well known? => I expect that "up to 70 percent" is based on an exceptional and small sample (for comparison: under five child mortality rate is 1:6 in Angola, more like 1:10 in south east Asia)

Meaning: 1) 50 out of 100 people were infect, 2) 35 of which would die, 3) leaving 50 who didn't get infected, 4) leaving 15 who survived.

Probably by inferring "up to half of the <living> population has been infected at some point".

In your version, only a quarter of the <living> population has been infected at some point since you have 15 infected out of 65 living people.

I'm not worried about this and neither is my father, an agricultural soil chemist of 30 years. This article is old.

There's a vaccine under development at Exeter too.....

The bacteria is Burkholderia pseudomallei. A tropical disease with 165k cases each year with 90k deaths. A decently high mortality rate - but this is in 3rd world tropics without proper testing/antibiotic sensitivities. When properly treated the mortality is 1/10.

But I've been drinking pretty heavily tonight, so who knows. Maybe you have it right now.

Isn't that still on the really high side of things?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_%28Roman_army%29

"A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten. Each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing."

"The procedure was a pragmatic attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders."

For rabies, postexposure vaccination is extremely effective in preventing infection and death. To the point that failures are notable:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/50/1/77/312471/Failure-...

Poor access to care/vaccines means that a lot of people still die from rabies, but it is the access that is the problem, not the effectiveness of the treatment.

* Survive for 16 years in distilled water,

* Infect humans and non-human animals,

* Feed off of amoebas,

* And potentially survive in the wild in the US,

as the article claims, then that is one badass microbe. It's the combination of all these things that makes this bug a bit frightening, even if the overall risk is fairly low. Even the combination of pathogenicity in mammals with being able to feed off of (I'm assuming they mean 'infect' when they say that) amoebas is rather unusual, AFAIK, although I'm not a biologist.

Still sounds, you know, very high.

I consider myself pretty liberal, but I won't even donate money to NPR because I think they're too biased.

Which given WHO data, means that you should be much more fearful of "Cirrhosis due to alcohol use" than anything to do with the disease in question.

I think we can best summarize it by saying... it sucks if you get it, and if you're traveling to an area where it's know to be more common you should be mindful of it... but you shouldn't lose sleep over it otherwise. Or as you said... clickbait title.

Looks like its not a first choice for weaponizing either (thought it's not a completely unsuitable one either).

should be "a bacterium"

or "bacteria that can live for decades ..."

not "a bacteria"