Far worse than Ebola

For the last decade we always thought that what are the deadly things? Fortunately there's very few things and most of them are very low probability you know some big volcanic explosion to get any growth quick asteroid. The nuclear case you've got to say we take it quite seriously. We bought a lot of money have a lot of people think about nuclear deterrence. Things is that work's been done and the rate the chance of a nuclear war is very low. But the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola is likely. 

If we look at the twentieth century and we look at the depth chart of the twentieth century. I think everybody would say oh yeah there must be a spike from World War one. You know sure enough there it is like twenty five million and it must be a big spike. It is it's like sixty five million but then you'll see this other spike that is as large as working for two right after World War one and most people a lot of people say what what what was that. There's two kinds of flus there's clues that spread between humans very effectively and they're still lose the kill lots of people. Those two properties have only been combined into a widespread flu once in history well that is Spanish flu we have no idea where it came from. it's called the Spanish flu because this Spanish press was the priest they were the first to talk openly about it.

 

I funded a disease modeling group that uses computer simulation and that work has been phenomenal and helping us target are poorly ratification resources and you know which parts of Nigeria should we work harder on. 

And it's very natural if you have a group like that to say Hey look at something like the Spanish flu in the modern day health systems are far better and seating K. that would be very bad well we tried it and and there are some assumptions we had to me but we showed is that the force of infection because of modern transport which compared to nineteen eighteen is over fifty times great and so if you get something like the flu and you look at that map of how within days it's basically in all urban centers of the entire globe that is are you opening that didn't happen with Spanish law in the past. The opportunity to do more than just let it run its course is really only in the last decade basically when you talk about Pershing talk about small molecules or talk about these complex biological protein like things of which is a sub class called antibodies antibodies of the molecules immune system naturally builds to attract disease. Today the idea that somebody says oh here's antibody make a lot of it make it very quickly that's right on the cutting edge and the ball up the damage showed me that we're not ready for a serious epidemic an epidemic that would be more infectious and spread faster than Ebola did this is the greatest risk of a huge traction this is the most likely thing by far to kill over ten million access people in a year we don't need to invest nearly what we do in military preparedness.

Bill Gates, 2015