The real world has little to do with Hollywood. As much as we would like, we do not have the teams of operative doctors and experts who start working at the first signs of a global outbreak of the epidemic. But Bill Gates would like them to be, and is ready to allocate $ 12 million for this. In search of universal vaccines, we have come a long way, but Gates believes that the way ahead is even longer. He told about this at a forum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1889, the Russian flu became the first influenza pandemic that swept the continents. A few decades later, the influenza pandemic in 1918 killed 675,000 people in just five weeks. Fortunately for us, today we have vaccines, medications and diagnostic methods that allow you to keep the epidemic more or less under control.
But according to Gates, we can not cope with so many more aspects. He recalled the 2009 H1N1 virus and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The world did not react quickly enough in any of these situations. We can not effectively track disease as it spreads. Local health systems do not cope. People were dying because we were not ready.
"The world should prepare for a pandemic as seriously as it does to war," Gates said.
One way to better prepare for the inevitable next pandemic is to develop better weapons to deal with outbreaks. To this end, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation joins forces with the family of Google founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page and launches a competition to develop a universal vaccine against the flu - the Universal Influenza Vaccine Development Grand Challenge.
A grandiose competition will allocate between $ 250,000 and $ 2 million in funding for two years for the most promising proposals for a universal vaccine. Then projects that "demonstrate promising evidence of the evidence of the concept," for example, during an animal test, can claim a total award of $ 10 million.
The article is based on materials .
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