Bill Gates: We must 'prepare ourselves for war' against future pandemics after Ebola

In an interview with AFP, Bill Gates has warned that health officials needs to learn from the fight against Ebola — and fast.

"A more difficult pathogen [than Ebola] could come along, a form of flu, a form of SARS or some type of virus that we haven't seen before," Gates said. "We don't know it will happen, but it's a high enough chance that one of the lessons of Ebola should be to ask ourselves: Are we as ready for that as we should be? A good comparison is that we prepare ourselves for war — we have planes and training and we practice."

During a Berlin conference of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which delivers vaccines to poor countries, Gates said it is "reckless" not to act now," AFP reports. His plan includes having teams of volunteers who can "mobilize quickly in a public health emergency," AFP notes, in a similar fashion to how workers responded to Ebola in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

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