Bill Gates says it’s time to redirect some of the money the world spends on weapons to prepare for a looming threat: terrorists with pathogens.<\/p>\n
He’s warning that the threat of bio-terrorism is “right up there with nuclear war and climate change.”<\/p>\n
Gates spoke at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday, and an abridged transcript of his speech was published by Business Insider.<\/p>\n
The billionaire Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) co-founder turned philanthropist has invested heavily in health initiatives around the globe, and now he’s speaking out in the hopes of spurring more investment in vaccines and medical research.<\/p>\n
He says it’s now necessary for the world to prep for what he considers to be one of its largest existential threats: the next pandemic.<\/p>\n
“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year,” he said. “And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”<\/p>\n
The most recent pandemic was even more deadly than that, Gates pointed out. A flu outbreak — that occurred naturally — killed between 50 million and 100 million people in 1918.<\/p>\n
Gates said modern technology can help prevent such a large-scale death toll.<\/p>\n
“The good news is that with advances in biotechnology, new vaccines and drugs can help prevent epidemics from spreading out of control,” he said — but that requires funding preventative research.<\/p>\n
“I’m optimistic that a decade from now, we can be much better prepared for a lethal epidemic if we’re willing to put a fraction of what we spend on defense budgets and new weapons systems into epidemic readiness,” he said.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: CNN<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bill Gates says it’s time to redirect some of the money the world spends on weapons to prepare for a looming threat: terrorists with pathogens. He’s warning that the threat of bio-terrorism is “right up there with nuclear war and climate change.” Gates spoke at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday, and an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":192674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/192674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}