Bill Gates is doing his part–he’s committed $50 million to battle Ebola this year and that’s just a small percentage of what he’s donated to fight disease in general. The Wall Street Journal pegs Gates’ giving to fight malaria alone at $200 million. Malaria hit more than 200 million people in West Africa in 2012. Gates is an expert on communicable diseases. He was at a conference in New Orleans this week, where he said “the world as a whole doesn’t have the preparedness for epidemics.”
On Ebola, Gates said: “if this thing had been twice as transmissive, we’d be in a lot of trouble, and there are agents that have a real chance of coming on in the next several decades that are far more transmissive than this is. What’s to stop some form of SARS showing up?”