American billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates in an interview with the BBC warned that in the next decade, humanity may face a deadly epidemic of the influenza virus. He fears that the world will not be able to react quickly enough to this situation, which could turn into a tragedy.
“I keep my fingers crossed so that a deadly epidemic like the flu doesn't happen in the next 10 years,” Gates said.
He stressed that now humanity has modern medical devices. But the billionaire is worried that humanity is unlikely to be able to effectively respond to a deadly disease that will spread rapidly.
An epidemic like this could be a tragedy, Gates said.
Bill Gates is worried about how humanity is responding to emergencies. Regulatory standards and various restrictions make the response to such events very slow.
The recent Ebola and Zika crises have shown how vulnerable the world is to epidemics, he said.
These examples, Gates said, showed that it is difficult for the world community to develop new drugs and new vaccines quickly enough.
The Bill Gates Foundation and his wife Melinda are investing billions of dollars to make vaccines for various diseases available in the world's poorest countries.
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This year, there was an outbreak of the Zika virus in the world, which mainly affected the countries of Latin America. The virus can be practically asymptomatic, but at the same time it causes severe pathologies of fetal development in pregnant women. In Brazil, for example, several thousand children were born with microcephaly - a reduced head size, which is considered one of the hallmarks of Zika.