In a 2015 TED talk, Gates hit the nail on the head, but his warning wasn’t heeded:
Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe is a highly infectious virus rather than a war.
We’ve invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents.
But we’ve invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic.
More transcript excerpts below, or
click to view the TED talk
Here are some transcript snippets from the talk …
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Lessons from the Ebola epidemic
About 10,000 people died (during the Ebola epidemic), and nearly all were in the three West African countries.
There are three reasons why it didn’t spread more.
- The first is that there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. They found the people and they prevented more infections.
- The second is the nature of the virus. Ebola does not spread through the air. With Ebola, by the time patients are contagious, most are so sick that they’re bedridden.
- Third, it didn’t get into many urban areas. And that was just luck. If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger.
So next time, we might not be so lucky.
Maybe there will be a virus where people feel well enough while they’re infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market.
So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse.
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Preparing for the next epidemic
We can build a really good response system.
- We have the benefits science and technology.
- We’ve got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them.
- We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they’re moving.
- We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen.
- We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who’ve got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise.
- And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. taking advantage of the military’s ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas.
- We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are.
- Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics.
If there’s one positive thing that can come out of past epidemics, it’s that they can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready.
If we start now (in 2015), we can be ready for the next epidemic.
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Thanks to LWH for feeding the lead.
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