The Most Dangerous Global Health Threats | Larry Brilliant | Big Think

If I were asked what are the greatest global threats to health today, I would divide that into two parts. One, of course, would be the biology: the Ebola, Zika, bird flu, swine flu world, and I will talk about that. But far more than that are the kind of centrifugal forces that are pulling us apart as a nation, pulling us apart as a world.

The deterioration of all of the international and national organizations that we depend upon to keep us safe is alarming. The World Health Organization, which failed to protect the world against Ebola and didn't do a great job on Zika either, will have a new leader in May of this year. There are a couple of candidates who are terrific and some that aren't so good. But either way, the WHO is going to be going through a period of years of introspection and reorganization.

We have a new Secretary General of the UN; he's a good guy from Portugal, Gutierrez. He just started. It'll be a while before he can find all the bathrooms in UN buildings. We've just lost the head of CDC, and we have a new acting head of CDC who is also good. However, CDC will go through a headless period.

Then we have Trump, and we have a White House that would almost reflexively discard anything that had the word public in it. One of those words is public health, and they have not shown a keen interest in pandemics. The whole idea of America first, which might be good for many things, is singularly not good for a global pandemic. Just, it's an oxymoron – it doesn't work.

These centrifugal forces that put us in a period of vulnerability are the gravest threats. On the biology side, in the last 30 years, we've had 30 novel, heretofore unknown diseases that jumped from animals to humans. They're almost all viruses. In addition to Ebola, Zika, bird flu, and swine flu, we have coronaviruses like SARS and MERS. We have harbor viruses and a lot of other viruses that continue to jump at the rate of about one a year. That rate is increasing slightly; however, I don't think it's increasing at a catastrophic rate.

The causes of its increasing are that animals and humans are living in each other's habitats now more than ever. Part of that is the clear-cutting of forests to grow soybeans and things of that nature. Another reason is that as countries have gotten slightly more wealthy, they begin to consume more protein and more animal protein.

I remember when I worked at Google. I gave a talk to 3,000 young Indian Googlers in Hyderabad. I asked them to raise their hand if their grandparents were vegetarian, and they all raised their hand. Then I asked them to raise their hand if their parents were vegetarians, and about half raised their hand. I asked if they were vegetarians, and no one raised their hand.

I think that's what leads to the increase in chickens and pigs that we've been seeing in China and India. Not that pig selection in India means that the kind of way in which, in Asia, houses and farms are all together; you can go to Laos and see a pancake house that has pigs on the ground, chickens in the middle, and humans up on top. When the pigs are eating, what's left of them is fed to the chickens, and when the chickens are eating, what's left of them is fed to the pigs. Of course, everything's fed to humans.

That's like a natural virus experiment; you really wouldn't want to do that if you were trying to keep the world safe from viruses. So, we are having more viruses jump from animals to humans for lots of different reasons related to modernity. Normally, our ability to protect the world keeps apace with that, maybe even is a little bit ahead, and every year we're a little bit safer. That's not true right now. Right now, because of the reorganization and nationalism, and the reorganization and dislike for the United Nations and its agencies, I think we're in a period of grave uncertainty.

So, it's those two things together.