Bill Gates fears epidemic worse than Ebola

You would think that Bill Gates, the ever-so-friendly richest man in the world, wouldn’t be afraid of much.

But as he recently told Ezra Klein at Vox, he does have some major fears for humanity.

“I rate the chance of a nuclear war within my lifetime as being fairly low,” says Gates. “I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic, far worse than Ebola, in my lifetime, as well over 50%.”

Gates is 59 years old.

So that means an outbreak of sorts is possibly coming in the next few decades.

It’s especially terrifying, Gates says, given the way we reacted to the last epidemic: The Ebola outbreak of last year showed how unready the world is for dealing with infectious disease.

The last widespread killer epidemic was the Spanish Flu. Between 1918 and 1919, it killed between 20 million and 40 million people worldwide — more than World War I.

What’s even more frightening, Gates says, is that we don’t even know where the Spanish Flu came from — it was just called the “Spanish Flu” because the press in Spain were the first to report on it.

In many ways, we’re even more vulnerable to an infectious catastrophe today. Gates tells Vox that according to his modeling, 50 times more people cross borders today than they did back in 1918.

Because of that and other factors, Gates estimates that the next Spanish flu-like epidemic could kill 33 million humans in 250 days. That number of people would be about equal to the population of Canada.

“We’ve created, in terms of spread, the most dangerous environment that we’ve ever had in the history of mankind,” Gates tells Vox.

Source: Business Insider

Obama refuses travel ban on black ebola countries

Ann Coulter laments about Obama’s refusal to call a travel ban on black countries that export ebola:

There had never been a case of Ebola in the U.S. until a few months ago. Since then, thousands of people have died of the disease in Africa, and millions upon millions of dollars have been spent treating Ebola patients in the U.S. who acquired it there, one of whom has died.

But the Obama administration refuses to impose a travel ban.

This summer, the U.S. government imposed a travel ban on Israel simply to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu into accepting a ceasefire agreement. But we can’t put a travel restriction on countries where a contagious disease is raging.

It’s becoming increasingly clear this is just another platform for Obama to demonstrate that we are citizens of the world. The entire Ebola issue is being discussed — by our government, not the United Nations — as if Liberians are indistinguishable from Americans, and U.S. taxpayers should be willing to pay whatever it takes to save them.

Maybe we should give them the vote, too! If Ebola was concentrated in Finland and Norway — certainly Israel! — we’d have had a travel ban on Day One.

 

She also singles out the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, who likes to joke about ebola and zombies:

Dr. Tom Frieden justifies Obama’s refusal to prohibit flights originating in Ebola-plagued countries, saying, “A travel ban is not the right answer. It’s simply not feasible to build a wall — virtual or real — around a community, city or country.”

What is it with liberals living in gated communities always telling us that fences don’t work? THAT’S WHAT A QUARANTINE IS.

At the congressional hearing on Ebola last week, Republicans repeatedly pressed the CDC representative, Dr. Toby Merlin, to explain why Obama refuses to impose a travel ban.

In about 17 tries, Merlin came up with no plausible answer. Like Frieden, Merlin kept insisting that “the only way to protect Americans” is to end the epidemic in Africa.

Why, precisely, must we attack Ebola in Africa? Research on a cure doesn’t require cuddling victims in their huts. Scientists who discovered the AIDS cocktail didn’t spend their nights at Studio 54 in order to “fight the disease at its source.”

Until there’s a treatment, we can’t put out the disease there, or here. The only thing Americans will be doing in Liberia is changing the bedpans of victims, getting infected and bringing Ebola back to America. When there’s a vaccine, we can mail it.

 

Coulter believes American troops sent to Liberia are also in grave danger:

Naturally, Obama is sending troops from the 101st Airborne, the pride of our Army, to Liberia. Their general should resign in protest.

Merlin further explained the travel ban, saying that if West Africans can’t fly to America, “that would cause the disease to grow in that area and spill over into other countries.” So instead of infecting people in surrounding countries, our CDC wants them to come here and infect Americans.

But that won’t happen because the government assures us there’s nothing to worry about with Ebola. They’ve got it under control.

Unfortunately, everything the government says about this disease keeps being proved untrue — usually within a matter of days.

They told us that you’d basically have to roll in an infected person’s vomit to catch the disease. Then, nurses at two first-world hospitals in Spain and the U.S. contracted Ebola from patients.

With no evidence, the CDC simply announced that the nurses were not following proper “protocol.” The disease didn’t operate the way CDC said it would, so the hospitals must be lying.

The government told us that national quarantines won’t work, but then they quarantine everyone with Ebola — or who has been near someone with Ebola, such as an entire NBC crew. To me, this suggests that there’s some value in keeping people who have been near Ebola away from people who have not.

Quite obviously, the only way to protect Americans is to prevent Ebola from coming here in the first place. The problem isn’t that Ebola will leap across oceans to infect Americans; it’s that Obama doesn’t want to protect Americans.

At least he’s only putting expendable Americans on the frontlines of the Ebola epidemic — doctors, nurses, members of the 101st Airborne.

At the moment, more than 13,000 West Africans have travel visas to come to the U.S. Having just seen an Ebola-infected Liberian get $500,000 worth of free medical treatment in the U.S., the first thing any African who might have Ebola should do is get himself to America.

Of all the reasons people have for coming here — welfare, drug-dealing, Medicare scams — “I have Ebola and I’m going to die, otherwise” is surely one of the strongest. The entire continent of Africa now knows that this is a country that will happily spend half a million dollars on treating someone who just arrived — and then berate itself for not doing enough.

Thomas Eric Duncan’s family may be upset with his treatment, but they have to admit, the price was right. Medical bill: $0.00. Your next statement will arrive in 30 days.

And now we’re going to have to let in entire families with Ebola, because the important thing is — actually, I don’t know why. It’s some technical, scientific point about fences not working.

 

Coulter urges Republicans, as well as all Americans, to demand Frieden’s resignation.

 

World War E

As the unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa, dubbed “World War E,” rages out of control, the United Nations is admitting the approximately 6,000 peacekeepers still in Liberia are not trained in health-care operations.

The acknowledgement comes after a top German virologist told reporters Friday he does not expect the Ebola virus to burn out in Liberia or Sierra Leone until it infects half the population of the two countries and kills 5 million people.

Confirmed cases of Ebola have increased 57 percent in the past three weeks, with the death toll currently at 1,296 and no end in sight, according to updated World Health Organization statistics.

Jones Schmidt-Chanasit, the director of viral diagnostics at the Bernhard Nocht Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, told the international press Friday he and his colleagues have lost all hope of halting the spread of the virus in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

“We lost the possibility of controlling this Ebola outbreak in those two countries back in May or June,” Schmidt-Chanasit said.

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia has not been slowed by the more than 8,000 U.N. personnel currently in Libya, including 6,000 uniformed peacekeepers. According to U.N. records, there are 4,460 troops, 126 military observers and 1,434 police forces, with an approved budget from July 2014 through June 2015 of $427.3 million.

Last week, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Hervé Ladsous addressed media in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, vowing the U.N. will continue to stand by Liberia as it battles an “unprecedented” Ebola outbreak. He said the peacekeepers will be “standing by Liberia through good and bad times.”

Some 95 percent of the expatriate doctors left when the Ebola outbreak began in March, leaving 50 physicians to treat the country’s 4.3 million population.

Ladsous, according to the U.N. News Center, emphasized that a peacekeeping mission is not a public health mission, stressing that handling the Ebola outbreak is “not something we are trained for.”

“It is true that we, the international community, have invested a lot over the years to bring back peace and security to Liberia, and, more generally, to West Africa. And it is even more true that we do not want to jeopardize that patient work,” stated Ladsous.

He added that while the UNMIL, the United Nations Mission in Liberia, is not a public health operator, the mission and the wider U.N. system would be on hand to ensure Liberia overcome the crisis.

“You have seen the very public and proactive position taken by the secretary-general … who has given orders to the entire U.N. system to mobilize in comprehensive, strategic [and] concrete ways to support efforts to stem the epidemic,” he said.

The civil war that raged from 1989 to 2003 left Liberia with 250,000 dead, the country in economic ruin and overrun with weapons, the capital city without electricity or running water, and the presence of some 15,000 United Nations peacekeepers, one of the most expensive peacekeeping efforts in U.N. history.

The fourth poorest nation in the world, Liberia suffers unemployment estimated to be as high as 85 percent, with 90 percent of the population earning less than $410 a year.

The population of Monrovia doubled to an estimated 1.5 million as a result of the civil war, with most of the residents crowded into shantytown slums lacking sanitation, such as West Point, Buzzi Quarter, Clara Town and Sawmill. About two-thirds of the population lacks access to clean toilets, with cholera rampant and the two leading child killers listed as malaria and diarrhea.

Source: WND