Gates warns conflicts stoke risk of global pandemic
War and turmoil go hand-in-hand with disease and are the most likely agents to produce a global pandemic capable of killing millions of people, Bill Gates said on Saturday.
“War zones and other fragile state settings are the most difficult places to eliminate epidemics,” Gates told the Munich Security Conference.
“They’re also some of the most likely places for them to begin — as we’ve seen with Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and with cholera in the Congo Basin and the Horn of Africa.”
“So, to fight global pandemics, we must fight poverty, too… The point is, we ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril,” he said.
Gates said experts were warning that a new pandemic could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year, with a reasonable probability that such an event could occur in the next 10-15 years.
The figures appeared hard to believe, but Gates recalled that the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million to 100 million people.
Even if there were no repeat, “we would be wise to consider the social and economic turmoil that might ensue if something like Ebola made its way into a lot of major urban centres,” he said.
“We were lucky that the last Ebola outbreak was contained before it did.”
Gates, who made his fortune with software giant Microsoft and now devotes millions of dollars to philanthropy, said new vaccines and treatment regimes would help.
At the same time, most of the control measures needed were those that governments had already put in place to cope with a terrorist biological attack, he said.
Get the latest news delivered straight to your inbox every day of the week. Stay informed with the Guardian’s leading coverage of Nigerian and world news, business, technology and sports.
1 Comments
Good talk Bill Gates. We are seeing humanitarian disaster issues in our own backyard with the IDPs, a product of the Boko insurgency. Our children are undernourished, malnourished and some will be permanently stunted and damaged for the rest of their life. Remember the 4 cases of polio which dragged Nigeria back to polio endemicity (after 2 years of polio freedom) came from the IDPs and other conflict induced inaccessible areas of Nigeria. Conflicts set nations back to underdevelopment
We will review and take appropriate action.