what it is you're worried about. what it is nightmare scenario looks like?

Bill Gates: Fortunately, there's very few things and most of them are very low

probability

some big volcanic explosion

A giant earthquake, asteroid

At least in the nuclear case

you gotta say we take it quite seriously. We budget a lot of money, have a lot of

people who think about nuclear deterrence,

I'm very glad that works being done and

I rate the chance of a nuclear war in my lifetime has being fairly low.

I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola

in my lifetime as well over 50 percent.

If we look at the 20th Century, and we look at the death chart

of the 20th Century, I think everybody would say oh yeah there must be a spike

from World War I

and you know sure enough there it is like 25 million

and I must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is – like 65 million

but then you'll see this other spike that

is as large as World War II, right after World War I – and most people, a lot

of people say what? Wait a minute – what was that?

There's two kinds of flus:

There's flus that spread between humans very effectively

and there's flus that kill lots of people. And those two properties have

only been combined

I into a widespread flu

once in history. That is Spanish Flu.

We have no idea where it came from – it's called the Spanish flu

because the Spanish press was the freest,

they were the first to talk openly about it.

and so in the annals of epidemic history that's the big event.

I funded a disease modeling group that uses computer simulation

and that work has been phenomenal in helping us

target our polio eradication resources – which parts of nigeria should we

work harder on? And it's very natural if you have a group like that to say hey

look at something like the Spanish flu in the modern day.

Health systems are far better and so you'd think, hey that wouldn't be very bad.

Well, we tried it – and there are some assumptions we had to make – but what we showed is that the

force of infection, because modern transport

which be compared to 1918 is over fifty times as great,

if you get something like the [Spanish] flu and you look at that map

of how within days it's basically

in all urban centers of the entire globe

That is very, uh, eye-opening.

that didn't happen with Spanish flu in the past.

The opportunity in did do more than just

let it run its course is really only in the last decade

basically when you talk about drugs, you can talk about small molecules or you can talk about

these

complex biological protein like things which is a subclass called antibodies

antibodies are the molecules the immune system naturally builds to attack disease

Today, the idea that somebody says oh here's an antibody

make a lot of it made it very quickly that's right on the cutting edge.

and the Ebola epidemic showed me that we're not ready

for a serious epidemic. An epidemic that would be more infectious and would spread faster

than Ebola did. This is the greatest risk

have a huge tragedy. This is the most likely thing by far

to kill over 10 million excess people

in a year. We don't need to invest nearly what we do

in military preparedness. this is something where

less than a billion a year on R&D, medical surveillance,

on standby personnel, cross-training the military so they can play a role in

terms of all the logistics here. This can be done

and we may not get many more warnings like this one

to to say okay it's a pretty modest investment

to avoid something that, really, in terms of the human condition would be a

gigantic setback.