Gates Package — page 896

If you think Ebola is bad, let me 14, I started writing a memo The New England Journal of Medicine, Even though Ebola wasn't going to kill many Americans, it did remind them that an infectious disease can travel long distances.. A frightening disease had come to the United States as well as the United Kingdom and Italy--places that American tourists liked to visit. The fact that there had been a total of six cases and one death in those three countries, versus more than 11,000 in West Africa, didn't matter. Americans were paying attention to epidemics, at least for the moment. I thought it might be an opportunity to highlight the fact that the world wasn't ready to handle an infectious disease that really could cause a pandemic. If you think Ebola is bad, let me tell you what the flu could do. Over the Christmas holidays of 2014, I started writing a memo about the gaps in the world's readiness that had been highlighted by Ebola. The gaps were enormous. There was no systematic way to monitor the progress of disease through communities. Diagnostic tests, when they were available, took days to return results--an eternity when you need to quarantine people if they're infected. There was a volunteer network of brave infectious disease experts who went to help authorities in the affected countries, but no large full-time team of paid experts. And even if there had been such a team, there was no plan in place to move them to where they needed to be. <~?~Insert art 007_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> <~?~NO CAPTION FOR THIS ILLUSTRATION (Illustration showing a checklist for responding to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.)> In other words, the problem was not that there was some system in place that didn't work well enough. The problem was that there was no system at all. I still didn't think it made sense for the Gates Foundation to make this one of its top priorities. I also thought that rich world governments would get in gear after the Ebola scare, if they understood what was at stake. I published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine,