Gates Package — page 893

children, and yet shockingly little money was being spent on these diseases.6 Melinda and I saw this as the area where our resources and our understanding of how to build teams to create new innovations could make the biggest difference. <~?~Insert art 004_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> A billboard promoting AIDS awareness and prevention in Lusaka, Zambia. This is a source of a common misconception about our foundation's health work. It's not concentrated on protecting people in rich countries from diseases. It concentrated on the gap in health between high-income countries and low-income ones. Now, in the course of that work, we learn a lot about diseases that can affect the rich world, and some of our funding will help with these diseases, but they are not a focus of our grantmaking. The market system, rich-country governments, and other philanthropists put a lot of resources into that work. Pandemics of course affect all countries, and I have worried a lot about them since I first studied infectious diseases. Respiratory viruses, including the influenza family and the coronavirus family, are particularly dangerous because they can spread so fast. The possibility of a flu pandemic was, relatively speaking, well known; many people had at least heard of the 1918 flu, which killed something like 50 million people, and they might have remembered the swine flu pandemic of 2009-10. But a century is a long time, so almost no one alive lived through the flu pandemic, and the swine flu pandemic didn't turn out to be a huge problem because it wasn't much more fatal than the normal flu. At the time I was learning all this, in the early 2000s, coronaviruses--which are one of three virus types that cause most common colds--weren't discussed nearly as often as the flu. <~?~Insert art 005_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1>