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.
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.
He did not touch the real thing but when he got to the peak,he touched the uppermost wire.People said it is neutral.All the same no sane person will try that stunt on a live powerline as he did.
Those power lines don't carry neutral. The upper line is for protection against thurder lighting. My guess is there was no power on those line.
200mega watt?. Make una dey careful how una de write o. 200MW on his own? A turbine in sapele power station de generate highest 120MW. Then only one person construct 200MW
kryptonite44: For those that have used uni-assist, ur attention is needed urgently.
please I have a kind of technical questions to ask. I'm applying to some schools in Germany via uni-assist, I'm applying for a friend and myself. My friend is going for B.sc while I'm going for M.sc and we are applying to 3 different schools each. the question is, is it possible to pay once for the both of us ( I mean the €75) or we will pay the (€75) each?
Secondly, after filling the school online application form will I print and send it along side with my documents to uni-assist?
Even if both of you applied to the same school you have to pay separately. The both of you can't use the same uni-assist account. Your second question is Yes. You will see all your personal details you filled in and you must PERSONALLY sign it.