The next outbreak? We’re not ready
同志社中学校２年

伊藤凛

香That’s why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cansof food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go
downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. Today the greatest riskof global catastrophe. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few
decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not
missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we’ve invested
a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we’ve actually invested very little ina system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic.
Let’s look at Ebola. I’m sure all of you read about it in the newspaper, lots oftough challenges. I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we useto track polio eradication. And as you look at what went on, the problem
wasn’t that there was a system that didn’t work well enough, the problem wasthat we didn’t have a system at all. In fact, there’s some pretty obvious key
missing pieces.
We didn’t have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone,seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. The case reports camein on paper. It was very delayed before they were put online and they wereextremely inaccurate. We didn’t have a medical team ready to go. We didn’t
have a way of preparing people. Now, Médecins Sans Frontières did a great
job orchestrating volunteers. But even so, we were far slower than we shouldhave been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. And a large
epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers. There
was no one there to look at treatment approaches. No one to look at thediagnostics. No one to figure out what tools should be used. As an example,
we could have taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasmaback in people to protect them. But that was never tried. So there was a lotthat was missing. And these things are really a global failure. The WHO is13

中学生―Ｄ部門

When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war.

funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about. Now,in the movies it’s quite different. There’s a group of handsome epidemiologists
ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that’s just pure Hollywood.
The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more
中学生―Ｄ部門

devastating than Ebola Let’s look at the progression of Ebola over this year.
About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West Africancountries. There’s three reasons why it didn’t spread more. The first is that
there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. They found the people
and they prevented more infections. The second is the nature of the virus.
Ebola does not spread through the air. And by the time you’re contagious,
most people are so sick that they’re bedridden. Third, it didn’t get into manyurban areas. And that was just luck. If it had gotten into a lot more urban
areas, the case numbers would have been much larger.
So next time, we might not be so lucky. You can have a virus where people
feel well enough while they’re infectious that they get on a plane or they go toa market. The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or
it could be bioterrorism. So there are things that would literally make things
a thousand times worse. In fact, if there’s one positive thing that can comeout of the Ebola epidemic, it’s that it can serve as an early warning, a wakeup call, to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.

出典https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready/transcript?language=ja#t-135639

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