Bill Gates Just Described His Biggest Fear — And It Could Kill 330 Million People In Less Than A Year
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Via: Business Insider:
So that means an outbreak of sorts is coming in the next few decades.
It’s especially terrifying, Gates says, given the way we reacted to the last epidemic: the Ebola outbreak of last year showed how unready the world is for dealing with infectious disease.
The last widespread killer epidemic was the Spanish Flu. Between 1918 and 1919, it killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide — more than World War I.
What’s even more frightening, Gates says, is that we don’t even know where the Spanish Flu came from — it was just called the “Spanish Flu” because the press in Spain were the first to report on it.
In many ways, we’re even more vulnerable to an infectious catastrophe today. Gates tells Vox that according to his modelling, 50 times more people cross borders today than they did back in 1918.
Because of that and other factors, Gates estimates that the next Spanish flu could kill 330 million humans in 250 days, more than the entire population of the United States.
“We’ve created, in terms of spread, the most dangerous environment that we’ve ever had in the history of mankind,” Gates tells Vox.
