Mashed Metatoes

On Sunday, Oxfam warned that the death toll in Burma could reach 1.5 million without massive humanitarian intervention. To arrive at that figure, Oxfam used the U.N.’s 100,000 estimate as a base. Then they used research from previous natural disasters and demographic analysis (children and the elderly are less likely to survive, etc.) to predict that 15 times that many people could die from typhoid, malaria, dengue, cholera, and other diseases.