Tag Archives: Disease Outbreak

Bill Gates thinks an infectious disease outbreak could kill 30 million people at some point in the next decade — here’s how worried you should be

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http://www.businessinsider.com/pandemic-risk-to-humanity-2017-9

http://www.globalgoals.org/goalkeepers/datareport/

bill gates

As hurricanes and other natural disasters ravage the world and the threat of nuclear war looms, it’s hard to assess which risks for humanity are really the scariest right now.

But one of the biggest threats out there is one of the oldest: infectious disease, which can emerge naturally or be human-made, as in a case of bioterrorism.

As Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their recently released “Goalkeepers” report, disease — both infectious and chronic — is the biggest public health threat the world faces in the next decade. And although Gates said on a press call that “you can be pretty hopeful there’ll be big progress” on chronic disease, we are still unprepared to deal with the infectious variety.

Gates has repeatedly stated that he sees a pandemic as the greatest immediate threat to humanity on the planet.

“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year,” Gates wrote in an op-ed for Business Insider earlier this year. “And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10-15 years.”

Gates is right about the gravity of that threat, according to experts in the field.

George Poste is an ex officio member of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, a group created to assess the state of biodefense in the US,.

“We are coming up on the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic,” he told Business Insider. “We’ve been fortunately spared anything on that scale for the past 100 years, but it is inevitable that a pandemic strain of equal virulence will emerge.”

The 1918 pandemic killed approximately 50 million people around the globe, making it one of the deadliest events in human history.

David Rakestraw, a program manager overseeing chemical, biological and explosives security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Tom Slezak, the laboratory’s associate program leader for bioinformatics, also agree with Gates.

“Both natural and intentional biological threats pose significant threats and merit our nation’s attention to mitigate their impact,” they told Business Insider in an email.

It’s possible that a major outbreak could be intentionally created as the result of a biological weapon, but Poste thinks a serious bioterrorism attack is unlikely due to the complexity of pulling something like that off.

It’s very likely, however, that a highly dangerous disease would naturally emerge — and the consequences of that pandemic would be just as severe.

Regardless of how a disease starts to spread, preparedness efforts for pandemics are the same, according to Poste. And the recent outbreaks of Zika and Ebola have highlighted the need for more heightened disease surveillance capabilities. We’re still getting a handle on the health effects of Zika — and it seems like the mosquito-borne disease may be even more severe than we thought.

Experts have long advocated for better ways to recognize emerging threats before they become epidemics or pandemics. Poste also said we need to improve rapid diagnostic tests and get better at developing new therapeutics and vaccines — something Gates highlighted as a weakness in the “Goalkeepers” report as well.

Until that happens, that threat remains far more real than many of us realize.

 

Whose Lives Should Be Saved? Researchers Ask the Public

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In a church basement in a poor East Baltimore neighborhood, a Johns Hopkins doctor enlisted residents to help answer one of the most fraught questions in public health: When a surge of patients — from a disaster, disease outbreak or terrorist attack — overwhelms hospitals, how should you ration care? Whose lives should be saved first?

For the past several years, Dr. Lee Daugherty Biddison, a critical care physician at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues have led an unusual public debate around Maryland, from Zion Baptist Church in East Baltimore to a wellness center in wealthy Howard County to a hospital on the rural Eastern Shore. Preparing to make recommendations for state officials that could serve as a national model, the researchers heard hundreds of citizens discuss whether a doctor could remove one patient from lifesaving equipment, like a ventilator, to make way for another who might have a better chance of recovering, or take age into consideration in setting priorities.

At that first public forum in 2012 in East Baltimore, Cierra Brown, a former Johns Hopkins Hospital custodian, said she favored a random approach like a lottery. “I don’t think any of us should choose whether a person should live or die,” she said.

Alex Brecht, a youth program developer sitting across from her, said he thought children should be favored over adults. “Just looking at them, seeing their smiles, they have so much potential,” he said.

“Who’s going to raise them?” asked Tiffany Jackson, another participant.

The effort is among the first times, Dr. Daugherty Biddison said, that a state has gathered informed public opinion on these questions before devising policy on them. “I don’t want to be in a position of making these decisions without knowing what you think,” she told the residents. “We as providers,” she said, “don’t want to make those decisions in isolation.”

Rationing already occurs in delivering medical care in the United States, though some practices are little acknowledged. Committees struggle regularly over policies for allocating scarce organs for transplant.

During widespread drug shortages in recent years, doctors have sometimes chosen among cancer patients for proven chemotherapy regimens and among surgical patients for the most effective anesthetics. And doctors sometimes have to choose among patients who need treatment in intensive care units, which are often filled to capacity.