Larry Brilliant: My wish: Help me stop pandemics
Excerpt II from https://www.ted.com/
P1 Bird flu. I stand here as a representative of all terrible things -- this might be the worst. The key to
preventing or mitigating pandemic bird flu is early detection and rapid response. We will not have a
vaccine or adequate supplies of an antiviral to combat bird flu if it occurs in the next three years. WHO
stages the progress of a pandemic. We are now at stage three on the pandemic alert stage, with just a little
bit of human-to-human transmission, but no human-to-human sustained transmission.
P2 The moment WHO says we've moved to category four, this will not be like Katrina. The world as
we know it will stop. There'll be no airplanes flying. Would you get in an airplane with 250 people you
didn't know, coughing and sneezing, when you knew that some of them might carry a disease that could
kill you, for which you had no antivirals or vaccine? I did a study of the top epidemiologists in the world
in October. I asked them -- these are all fluologists and specialists in influenza -- and I asked them the
questions you'd like to ask them. What do you think the likelihood is that there'll be a pandemic? If it
happens, how bad do you think it will be? 15 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within three
years. But much worse than that, 90 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within your children
or your grandchildren's lifetime. And they thought that if there was a pandemic, a billion people would get
sick. As many as 165 million people would die.
P3 Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like so we know what we're talking
about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly.
You get two or three discrete locations. Then there'll be secondary outbreaks, and the disease will spread
from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks it will be
everywhere in the world. Now, if we had an "undo" button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it
when it first started. If we could find it early, and we had early detection and early response, and we could
put each one of those viruses in jail -- that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic.