Pandemics and Climate Change

In 2015, Microsoft founder Bill Gates argued that the threat of a pandemic was more probable than a nuclear war. He wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine on 9 April 2015 that we must prepare for future epidemics of diseases that may spread more effectively than Ebola. He said ‘There is a significant chance that an epidemic of a substantially moreinfectious disease will occur sometime in the next 20 years’. In February 2015, the President of the United States of America Obama wanted a report on ‘Lessons learned from Ebola outbreak’. The report said ‘It is sobering to note the odds are increasing that the United States will be called upon again in the not too distant future to respond to another health crisis that threatens global security’.