By the end of the outbreak, at least 283 humans had been infected and 109 had died, for a case fatality rate of almost 40 percent. Nobody wanted to eat pork, or to handle it, or to buy it. Pigs were left starving in their pens. Some broke out to roam the roadways like feral dogs, foraging for food. Malaysia at that time contained 2.35 million pigs, half of them from Nipah-affected farms, so this could have become an almost medieval problem, like a scene from the Black Death: herds of infected pigs stampeding ravenously through empty villages.