Bill Gates (Photo : REUTERS/JIM URQUHART)
Software tycoon Bill Gates warns about an epidemic worse than Ebola that has killed thousands of people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, in a paper published in the Journal of Medicine.
"There is a significant chance that an epidemic of a substantially more infectious disease will occur sometime in the next 20 years," Gates wrote.
The billionaire philanthropist considered a failure on a global scale and concurrently, a wake-up call. He added how member countries of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries have been exerting much effort in undergoing tactics and working on logistics to prepare and fight for war instead of getting ready for epidemic threats that can affect the world.
The last simulation exercises for an epidemic was in 2002, a year after the attack at the World Trade Center in New York. In 2014, Reuters reported about the tycoon's warning on the spread of the Ebola virus beyond West Africa.
Gates calls on the United Nations to focus on funding and empowering a global institution that will come up with a better system to warn the public and respond accordingly in case epidemics occurring naturally and from bio-terror attack happen.
He believes that with innovation and ingenuity, the world will be able to manage a massive epidemic. The billionaire reiterated the need to focus on health systems, diagnostics, drugs research and disease surveillance base.
"I believe that we can solve this problem, just as we've solved many others - with ingenuity and innovation," Gates mentioned in a summary of his paper featured in the New York Times column.
In his bid to convey his warning, Gates presented a blueprint discussing what steps need to be carried out. Included was a recommendation for investment expansion in strengthening laboratory-testing capacities of despondent countries where more epidemic outbreaks usually originate from.
Moreover, he called for a reserve corps of volunteers and trained personnel to contain and respond to these emergencies faster.
Apart from these, the philanthropist also expressed his disappointment on the lack of vaccine to fight the influenza strains.
Still, he stays optimistic this can be resolved and addressed.
To end, this was what he has to say, "By building a global warning and response system, we can prepare for it and prevent millions of deaths."
