The history of mankind is a history of suffering in the plague and fighting it.
In the Bible, there are 68 places that directly mention the “plague”. (In ancient times, people generally referred to malignant infectious diseases as plagues) .
The Great Eastern Plague of China in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, according to researcher statistics, about 20 million people died of disease in 15 years. (the population of the Eastern Han Dynasty was only 60 million) .
This tragedy, Cao Zhi wrote in the article: “Every family has the pain of zombies, every room has a cry of wailing, or knocks at the door, or mourns overthrown.”
But in fact, on this planet, compared to humans, the virus that caused the plague is the first comer.
Some scientists estimate that there are 100 billion virus particles in each liter of seawater.
If the viruses in the ocean are lined up, they can reach 42 million light years, much larger than the Milky Way.
In the history of thousands of years of human civilization, we have so far eliminated only one infectious disease: smallpox.
(In 1980, three leaders of the WHO Smallpox Fight Plan announced the global successful fight against smallpox, source: Wikipedia)
If you know this, you might feel a little frustrated.
Bill Gates, who was the richest man in the world for 17 years, publicly expressed his deep concern 5 years ago.
It is not the missiles but the infectious diseases that will kill us in the future
In 2015, Bill Gates, 60, gave a talk on the plague on TED.
At the beginning of the speech, he said that when they were young, their basement always had a big bucket filled with food and water.
Because all Americans are preventing nuclear war. The US-Soviet battle for hegemony, once the nuclear war broke out, they could hide in the basement and rely on that bucket to survive.
Now that the Soviet Union has been wiped out for nearly 30 years, that bucket is basically useless. Because human beings spend a lot of money and energy on nuclear deterrence, the possibility of a nuclear war breaking out is remote.
But Bill Gates judges that if something could kill tens of millions of people in the next few decades, it would probably be a highly contagious virus, not a nuclear war.
It’s not a missile, it’s a microorganism.
Because the world has not yet established an effective system for controlling the epidemic.
In 2001, the United States organized a simulation exercise on “germ confrontation.”
As a result, the germs had a complete victory, and humans were defeated.
We humans are simply not ready to prevent the next outbreak.
Finally, Bill Gates believes that if there is a large-scale influenza outbreak, the global economy will lose more than three trillion US dollars and millions of people will die.
The cost of prevention is far less than the loss.
However, we are still unwilling to do such prevention.
Because many countries in the world are more willing to use their money to buy weapons rather than invest in medical treatment.
The World Health Report 2010 advocates that the general government’s health expenditure in the world should account for no less than 5% of GDP, and personal health cash expenditure will account for 15% -20% of total national health expenditure.
But until 2016, the global average of this data was just over 3.5%, of which 6.1% in high-income countries and 1.5% in low-income countries.
A report released by the WHO in 2019 shows that in recent years, health expenditure in low- and middle-income countries has increased by an average of 6% per year, compared with 4% in high-income countries.
However, government expenditures account for only 51% of health expenditures in various countries, citizens pay more than 35% at their own expense, and 100 million people suffer from poverty every year.
In absolute terms, in low- and middle-income countries, the government spends $ 60 per citizen per year on health, while high-income countries approach $ 270.
A corresponding figure is that in 2017, the global per capita military expenditure was about $ 230.
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