What Bill Gates is afraid of

What s likeliest to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years It s probably not what you d think. For much more, read Ezra Klein s feature story: UPDATE: Watch our 2020 followup interview with Gates: There s something out there that s as bad as war, something that kills as many people as war, and Bill Gates doesn t think we re ready for it. Look at the death chart of the 20th century, he says, because he s the kind of guy that looks at death charts. I think everybody would say there must be a spike for World War I. Sure enough, there it is, like 25 million. And there must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is, it s like 65 million. But then you ll see this other spike that is as large as World War II right after World War I, and most people, would say, What was that Well, that was the Spanish In a 1990 paper on The Anthropology of Infectious Disease, Marcia Inhorn and Peter Brown estimated that infectious di