Rates of death from measles were declining until vaccines became common for the disease:

One hundred years ago in Scotland, the measles case-fatality rate was 30–40 deaths per 1000 cases [208]. In the United States, mortality from measles decreased from 25 per 1000 reported cases in 1912 [209, 210] to 1 per 1000 reported cases in 1962 [211]. In New York State, measles mortality decreased by >15-fold long before the introduction of measles vaccination (figure 2) [212]. US and UK case-fatality rates were ∼1 per 1000 reported measles cases from the 1940s through the 1980s
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/conten...ment_1/S4.full

... lag-adjusted PFC (Proportion of Fatal Cases) over time for Ebola in West Africa. The lag-adjusted PFC - about 80-85%...
http://www.healthmap.org/site/diseas....67OA2x2g.dpuf