>>21398994
>Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome’s Director, says: "Improving health for everyone is something no one nation, organisation or sector can do alone. It requires strong leadership and partnership across borders and sectors. We look forward to working with WHO and all its partners in a more formal capacity towards shared goals in pressing areas such as universal health care, drug-resistant infections, climate change and health and being better prepared for inevitable epidemics."
>Over the past three years, we have provided more than $8m in funding to WHO, supporting work such as the successful Ebola vaccine trials in Guinea
>>21399001
>The Wellcome Trust’s director, Sir Jeremy Farrar, is to take up the role of chief scientist at the World Health Organization next year.
Jeremy Farrar “Fighting pandemics should be funded 'like the military'”
https://www.wired.com/story/pandemic-threat-wellcome-trust-zika-ebola/
Apr 13, 2016 10:44 AM
Governments around the world need to invest in defending against pandemics such as Ebola and Zika in the same way they invest in the military, says the head of biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust. "We spend gazillions to defend ourselves from military attacks, but from the beginning of the twentieth century far more people have died from infection. We are hugely vulnerable from a public health perspective," explains Jeremy Farrar, an expert on infectious diseases.
Funding such defences cannot be left in the hands of private companies, he argues, just as we don't expect the free market to fund aircraft carriers. "This is public health. Private pharmaceutical companies will make – quite rightly – decisions based on potential commercial return. This has to be incentivised by governments, taxpayers and philanthropy, then industry has to be persuaded that it's in their interest. Otherwise we are leaving a potentially disastrous situation in the hands of the marketplace."
Farrar, who is speaking at WIRED Health on 29 April, described sudden outbreaks of diseases with no known vaccines or treatments as the new normal.
"We've had Ebola for the last two to three years, now Zika. Since 1998 I've been involved in about eight major epidemics including SARS and bird flu. This is the new world. These are not rare events," Farrar explains.
Diseases are more likely to spread these days because of a number of factors. Firstly, the world is more connected, which means people travel more frequently. Secondly, increasingly dense populations mean more interactions between humans and animals, where most diseases originate. Climate change also plays a role, with rising temperatures and humidity providing the perfect breeding ground for disease carriers. "With no drugs, no vaccines and no diagnostic tests, an outbreak goes from being a relatively small affair to 30,000 people," he adds, referring to Ebola in West Africa, which quickly claimed more than 11,300 lives.
Beyond the human cost, there is a massive financial cost to epidemics and pandemics, estimated at $60 billion (£42.17 billion) annually. Many of these costs fall on the private sector, through increased insurance claims and a fall in tourism. "The impacts on societies if we don't get prepared in terms of business disruption and economic loss, are huge," Farrar says.