Bill Gates 2015 : Il prêchait dans le désert

There were three reasons why it didn't spread more.

The first, there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. They found the people and they prevented more infections. The second is the nature of the virus. Ebola does not spread through the air, and by the time you are contagious, most people are so sick they were bed-ridden. Third, it didn't get into urban areas, and that was just luck. If it had gotten into more urban areas the case numbers would have been much larger.

So, NEXT TIME, we may not be so lucky. You can handle virus where people feel well enough while they are infectious, that they get on a plane or go through a market. The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bio-terrorism.

And so, there are things that would litterally make things a thousand times worse.

In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu, back in 1918. So here is what would have happened, it would spread throughout the world, very, very quickly, and you can see there is over 30 million people dead from that epidemic.

So, there is a serious problem. We should be concerned.

But, in fact, we can build a really good response system. We have all the benefits of science and technology that we talked about here. We've got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they are moving. We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turn around time to look at a pathogen and be able to manufacture drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen.

So, we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system, and we need preparedness.

The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again on what we're doing for war. For soldiers, we have full-time, ready to go, we have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers, and NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. NATO does a lot of war games, to check, are our people well-trained ? What they understand about fuel and logistics, and same radio frequency... so they are absolutely ready to go. So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic.

What are the key pieces ?

We need strong health systems in poor countries. That's were mothers can give birth safely. Kids can get all of their vaccines, but also where we'll see outbreak very early on. We need a medical reserve corps, lots of people who have got the training and background who are ready to go with the expertise. And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. Taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast through logistics in secure areas. We need to do simulations. Germ games, not war games. So that we see where the wholes are.

The last time a Germ Game was done in the United States, it was back in 2001, and it didn't go so well. So far, the score is Germ 1 People 0.

Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D (Research and Development) in areas of vaccines and diagnostics.

Time is not on our side.

Bill Gates, CEO, Microsoft

En 2015, le coût modeste était de 3 Trillions USD.