Bill Gates Calls For Increased Efforts To Swiftly Address Deadly Flu Outbreaks

Bill Gates (Tim Ireland/PA)

Bill Gates has warned the world would be "vulnerable" to a quick-spreading deadly flu outbreak.

Press Association report continues:

The billionaire philanthropist said the Ebola and Zika outbreaks exposed weaknesses in the ability to swiftly tackle health crises.

Mr Gates, whose foundation has pumped billions of pounds into vaccines and improving health systems in developing countries, said the development of new drugs can also be improved.

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "When we´ve seen Ebola or even now Zika, we realise we still haven´t done enough.

"Our ability to create new drugs and vaccines quickly where we have an emerging disease, our emergency response system where we get people in and try and stop these epidemics - we don´t have a strong enough system."

He said countries are grappling with how to ensure that regulatory, liability and organisational boundaries do not slow down the response to health crises.

He said: "So I cross my fingers all the time that some epidemic like a big flu doesn´t come along in the next 10 years.

"I do think we´ll have much better medical tools, much better response, but we are a bit vulnerable right now if something that spread very quickly, like a flu that was quite fatal.

"That would be a tragedy, and new approaches should allow us to reduce that risk a lot."

The Microsoft founder said greater global cooperation is needed in the development of new drugs and the deployment of health teams to tackle outbreaks.

If wealthy countries fail to step up and tackle these health problems deadly epidemics will spread across the world, he warned.

Mr Gates said: “So it’s not just the humanitarian goal here, it’s strong self-interest that we want global health security.”

He also defended the World Health Organisation, which came in for heavy criticism for what was perceived as its slow response to the Ebola crisis.

“The cooperation that we’ve seen, I think, needs to intensify - it’s the only way that global problems like epidemics will get solved,” Mr Gates said.

“And so although people are negative on WHO, the message to take away from that is not that that kind of multilateral cooperative effort is doomed and the money is not well spent.

“Rather, we actually need to broaden their capacity, we need to rededicate ourselves to this global cooperation.”

He also warned that the over-use of antibiotics and the growth of antimicrobial resistance has endangered everybody’s health.

Moves to stop using antibiotics on farm animals alone are not enough and countries must look at how they treat people too, Mr Gates said.