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Puhaha

High School Play

When I as a kid,
the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war
That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement
filled with cans of food and water
When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel
Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this
Instead, it looks like this
If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades,
it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war
Not missiles, but microbes
Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents
But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic
We are not ready for the next epidemic
Let's look at Ebola
I'm sure all of you read about it in the newspaper,
lots of tough challenges. I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication
And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough,
the problem was that we didn't have a system at all
In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces
We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread
The case reports came in on paper
It was very delayed before they were put online and they were extremely inaccurate
We didn't have a medical team ready to go
We didn't have a way of preparing people
Now, Medecins Sans Frontieres did a great job orchestrating volunteers
But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries
And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers
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[1] The next outbreak? We’re not ready - Bill Gates