Prepare for ‘war’ against global pandemic: Gates

BERLIN: Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates says the world must use the lessons from battling Ebola to prepare for any future “war” against a global killer disease, with the help of new technology.
Gates, in Berlin for a donor conference of the GAVI alliance bringing vaccines to poor countries, said the risk of a worldwide pandemic meant it was reckless not to act now.
“A more difficult pathogen (than Ebola) could come along, a form of flu, a form of SARS or some type of virus that we haven’t seen before,” he said in an interview with AFP.
“We don’t know it will happen but it’s a high enough chance that one of the lessons of Ebola should be to ask ourselves: are we as ready for that as we should be?
A good comparison is that we prepare ourselves for war — we have planes and training and we practise.”
He said this included building teams of volunteers who are ready to mobilise quickly in a public health emergency, similar to schemes developed in the countries hit hardest by Ebola: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which registered almost 9,000 deaths in the last year.
Gates, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s richest man with a net worth of some $80 billion (70 billion euros), said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation distributes about $4 billion each year to help the world’s neediest.
It is also a major contributor to the GAVI alliance, which Tuesday drew pledges of $7.5 billion to help immunise 300 million more children in developing countries over the next five years. Calling vaccines the “biggest saver of lives” worldwide, the 59-year-old praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for hosting the GAVI conference and making vaccinations a priority of her G7 presidency this year.
However he said he was “concerned” about an anti-vaccination trend in the West, due to exaggerated fears of risks associated with the jabs, that was leading to dangerous outbreaks.