Bill Gates: 'pandemic will cost 30 million lives'

amsterdam - Billionaire Bill Gates turns out to be a mischievous prophet. According to him, the world is on the brink of a 'pandemic'. A new deadly disease is about to break out that could cost thirty million victims.

Gates, who is not a doctor herself, says that we must prepare ourselves for it 'as if a war is coming'. The man behind Microsoft last Friday attended a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society and the renowned medical journal New England Journal of Medicine.

'I am usually the optimist in the room, but we are not making any progress in preparing for pandemics. '

He is also afraid of terrorists who intentionally spread viruses. 'A small group can easily develop a more deadly version of anthrax in a lab,' says Gates. And that disease could move fast because of the many air traffic, he fears.

For example, Gates showed a simulation showing that a new variant of the Spanish flu (which killed 50 million people in 1918) could kill 30 million people in six months.

'If you told governments around the world that someone is working on weapons that can kill 30 million people, then action would be taken immediately. But this urge is not felt for biological threats. But the world has to prepare for a new pandemic as if it were a war, 'Gates thinks.

Yet Gates also sees light points: mankind now has antiviral drugs that already increase the survival chances of those who are ill. We are close to a universal flu vaccine: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation currently offers about 10 million euros in scholarships to achieve this. And we are getting better at making the right diagnoses, important because fast quarantine is a crucial step in fighting a pandemic.