American business magnate Bill Gates, has always been spookily prophetic when it comes to the future of tech. He predicted social media, smart-watches, instant online payments and personal assistants decades before they reached peoples screens and took over many lives.
Now it seems the Microsoft CEO has a grave warning for all concerning healthcare.
Speaking at a discussion about epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, Gates considered that the next deadly disease that may cause a global pandemic is coming, and that the world is not prepared to face it.
"There's one area though where the world isn't making much progress," Gates warned the crowd, according to the Business Insider. "That's pandemic preparedness."
The 62-year-old philanthropist also believes that individuals and groups could create weaponised diseases that easily spread across the globe.
Gates presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modelling that showed how a new flu, similar to the one that killed 50 million people in 1918, would most likely kill 30 million within six months.
"In the case of biological threats, that sense of urgency is lacking," he said. "The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war."
According to Gates, the good news, remains that there’s still time to get our priorities straight, and that governments need to place great responsibility on battling threats.
