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. [...]
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. [...]
In some ways, we're better prepared now than we were for previous pandemics. We have antiviral drugs that can in many cases do at least something to improve survival rates. We have antibiotics that can treat secondary infections like pneumonia associated with the flu. [...]
And we're getting better at rapid diagnosis too — which is essential, as the first step toward fighting a new disease is quarantine. Just this week, a new research paper in the journal Science touted the development of a way to use the gene-editing technology Crispr to rapidly detect diseases and identify them using the same sort of paper strip used in a home pregnancy test.
No comments:
Post a Comment