Bill Gates thinks coming disease could kill 30 million in 6 months

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the US and the rest of the world lack a sense of urgency to counter biological threats, reports Business Insider.

The American tech mogul said if there was one thing that we know from history it is that a deadly new disease will arise and spread around the globe.

That could happen easily within the next decade and we are not ready, said Gates on Friday at a discussion about epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Gates acknowledged that he is usually the optimist in the room and reminded the audience that children are being freed from poverty around the globe and that science is getting better at eliminating diseases like polio and malaria

But “there is one area though where the world is not making much progress,” Gates said, “and that is pandemic preparedness.”

The likelihood that such a disease will appear continues to rise, he added.

Medical staff working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) prepare to bring food to patients kept in an isolation area at the MSF Ebola treatment centre in Kailahun Jul 20, 2014. Reuters

New pathogens emerge all the time as the world population increases and humanity encroaches on wild environments and it is becoming easier and easier for individual people or small groups to create weaponised diseases that could spread like wildfire around the globe, he warned.

According to Gates, a small non-state actor could build an even deadlier form of smallpox in a lab.

And in our interconnected world, where people are always hopping on planes, crossing from cities on one continent to another it could spread in a matter of hours.

Gates presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modeling that found that a new flu similar to the one that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic would now most likely kill 30 million people within six months.

And the disease that next takes us by surprise is likely to be one we see for the first time at the start of an outbreak, similar to the recent SARS and MERS virus incidents, Gates said.

If you were to tell the world’s governments that weapons that could kill 30 million people were under construction right now, there would be a sense of urgency about preparing for the threat, he said.

“In the case of biological threats, that sense of urgency is lacking,” he said. “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.”

STOPPING THE NEXT PANDEMIC

Observers look out of windows as “patients” walk past during a SARS outbreak drill in Hong Kong Nov 19, 2004. Reuters

The one time the military tried a sort of simulated war game against a smallpox pandemic, the final score was “smallpox one, humanity zero,” Gates said.

But he reiterated his inherent optimism, saying he thought preparations for the next viral or bacterial threat could be improved.

In some ways preparations are better now than they have been before – there are antiviral drugs that can, in many cases, improve survival rates and antibiotics that can treat secondary infections like pneumonia associated with the flu.

Science is also closer to discovering a universal flu vaccine, Gates said, announcing on Friday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would offer $12 million in grants to encourage its development.

Science is also better at rapid diagnosis, but is not yet good enough at rapidly identifying the threat from a disease and coordinating a response, as the global reaction to the latest Ebola epidemic showed, Business Insider said.

There needs to be better communication between militaries and governments to help coordinate responses, Gates said. And he thinks governments need ways to quickly enlist the help of the private sector when it comes to developing technology and tools to fight an emerging deadly disease.

Melinda Gates recently said that the threat of a global pandemic, whether it emerges naturally or is engineered, was perhaps the biggest risk to humanity.