Pandemics: biggest security threat; spending millions could save trillions

Spending billions on pandemic prevention could save trillions, according to a new report sponsored by several major foundations. The report estimates that pandemics could cost humanity $6tn in the 21st century, or $60bn a year, and argues for an investment of $4.5bn a year, or 65 cents per resident of the planet, to prepare. "There are very few threats that can compare with infectious diseases in term of their potential to result in catastrophic loss of life, yet nations devote only a fraction of the resources spent on national security to prevent and prepare for pandemics". 

Severe outbreaks of infectious diseases could pose more of a risk to the global economy than wars or financial crises, but the world is largely unprepared for them, says a new report.

Red Cross workers carry away a person suspected of dying from Ebola, in the Liberian capital Monrovia, on Oct. 4, 2014. Pascal Guyot | Getty Images

The study, released Wednesday, says infectious diseases are improperly viewed strictly as health issues, rather than as potential threats to security or economic stability. The report comes from the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future, a research group that lists the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development and several others as sponsors. The study says that another global pandemic on the scale of the 1918 influenza outbreak, which killed between 50 million and 100 million people, could cost the global economy an average loss of more than $60 billion a year. But governments spend little preventing the outbreaks of disease compared with money spent on national security and financial crises.



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"We have not done nearly enough to prevent or prepare for such potential pandemics," the commission's chair, Peter Sands, wrote in the preface to the report. "While there are certainly gaps in our scientific defenses, the bigger problem is that leaders at all levels have not been giving these threats anything close to the priority they demand. Ebola and other outbreaks revealed gaping holes in preparedness, serious weaknesses in response, and a range of failures of global and local leadership. This is the neglected dimension of global security."

Despite advances in disease research and medicine, disease researchers and public health experts believe the risks of pandemics are growing as the world becomes more connected through travel, trade and communication.

The report estimates that about $4.5 billion per year — about 65 cents per person — "could better protect everyone in the world from such risks." About $3.4 billion of that would go to upgrading health systems in poorer countries. another $1 billion would go toward medical research and development, and the remainder would provide offices and contingency funds at the United Nations and the World Bank set aside for preventing or responding to crises.

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