A coming disease could kill 30 million people within 6 months

An illness like the pandemic 1918 influenza could kill 30 million people within six months, Gates said, adding that the next disease might not even be a flu, but something we've never seen.

The world should prepare as it does for war, Gates said.



If there's one thing that we know from history, it's that a deadly new disease will arise and spread around the globe.

That could happen easily within the next decade. And as Bill Gates told listeners on Friday at a discussion about epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine, we're not ready.

Gates acknowledged that he's usually the optimist in the room, reminding people that we're lifting children out of poverty around the globe and getting better at eliminating diseases like polio and malaria.

But "there's one area though where the world isn't making much progress," Gates said, "and that's pandemic preparedness."

The likelihood that such a disease will appear continues to rise. New pathogens emerge all the time as the world population increases and humanity encroaches on wild environments. It's becoming easier and easier for individual people or small groups to create weaponized diseases that could spread like wildfire around the globe.

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

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

Gates presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modeling that found that a new flu like 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, like what happened recently with SARS and MERS viruses.

watch the simulation below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9afTl9z5JHQ

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.

"Think of the number of people who leave New York City every day and go all over the world - we're an interconnected world," she said.

Those connections make us all vulnerable.