28 January 2015

Gates on future pandemics


Time has an article about Bill Gates' thoughts on emerging diseases:
Bill Gates (photo), the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, has cautioned that a technology-based action plan is needed to guard against future pandemics similar to how we “prepare ourselves for war”. His charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which disburses nearly four billion dollars worldwide, urged the international community to apply lessons learned from the Ebola crisis to develop a plan for future outbreaks. One strategy would be to create volunteer teams able to respond quickly to a public health emergency, Agence-France Presse reported.
“A more difficult pathogen than Ebola could come along, a form of flu, a form of SARS or some type of virus that we haven’t seen before,” Gates said. “We don’t know it will happen, but it’s a high enough chance that one of the lessons of Ebola should be to ask ourselves: are we as ready for that as we should be? A good comparison is that we prepare ourselves for war; we have planes and training and we practice.”
Gates outlined his fears in a speech in Berlin, Germany for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which delivers vaccines to the Global South. His warning comes on the heels of a World Bank statement that the Earth is “dangerously unprepared” for another public health emergency similar to the Ebola outbreak.
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