The real world has little to do with Hollywood. As much as we might wish, we have no operational teams of doctors and experts who start working at the first signs of a global outbreak. But bill gates wish they were, and is ready to allocate $ 12 million. Looking for a universal vaccine, we have come a long way, but gates believes that the path ahead is still long. This he said, speaking at a forum at the Massachusetts Institute of technology. In 1889, the Russian flu was the first pandemic of influenza which swept the continents. Within a few decades, the influenza pandemic of 1918 killed 675 000 people in just five weeks. Fortunately for us, today we have vaccines, medicines and diagnostic methods that allow you to keep the epidemic more or less under control.
But according to gates, we are unable to cope even with so many aspects. He recalled the H1N1 virus in 2009, and the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. The world did not react quickly enough in any of these situations. We can’t effectively track diseases as they spread. The local health system can not cope. People died because we were not ready.
“The world must prepare for pandemic as serious as the war,” says gates.
One of the ways to better prepare for the inevitable next pandemic is to develop the best weapons to fight outbreaks. To this end, the bill and Melinda gates Foundation joins forces with the family of the founder of Google and CEO of Google Larry page and starts a competition to develop a universal flu vaccine, Universal Influenza Vaccine Development Grand Challenge.
The Grand contest will provide from 250,000 to 2 million dollars of funding over two years to the most promising of the proposals to create a universal vaccine. Then projects that “will demonstrate promising data on the proof-of-concept” for example, during animal testing, can qualify for a full reward in the amount of $ 10 million.
Bill gates has allocated $ 12 million for universal flu vaccine
Ilya Hel