

Bill Gates on Flying Cars, the Malaria Epidemic, and Article-Writing Robots - zhihonglin
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/qa_gates/

======
brownbat
Wow, already responding to the flying cars vs. 140 chars comment.

I especially liked the bit on his current expertise:

> Gates: We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or
> we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging.
> Seriously, we have two communities that don’t intersect with each other.

For me, one of the things I didn't realize is how steep the side effects for
anti-malarials can be, or how short a time frame you can take them without
destroying organs. I sort of took it for granted that we had solutions that
allowed us to travel the planet, that it was just a "well, poor people don't
have access to our awesome first world drugs."

It's... not like that.

I sometimes wondered as a sci fi loving kid what would happen if we were on
multiple planets, could diseases and adaptations evolve so quickly that travel
between human communities would be basically fatal?

The harrowing reality? We're right on the edge of that very situation. We'll
get that on this planet if we don't get our act together.

~~~
bargl
I traveled to Bolivia and Haiti for an extended time. I took malaria pills for
a few weeks then stopped, because the pills only work on certain strains of
Malaria. So even if you TAKE the pills you can still get it.

The side effects suck, talk about weird dreams, feeling bad, and just other
nastyness. I honestly don't remember what they all were but I know I stopped
taking the pills because of that. They are also very expensive.

Malaria is a huge problem in Haiti and Bolivia some of the nuns I was staying
with had it more than once. I was always more afraid of dengue than malaria,
but that is because that was the bug going around locally.

I'm no expert on Malaria and I don't know why it isn't a bigger problem in the
states, but I can tell you that the meds are difficult to take for an extended
period of time and (granted I never got malaria) the pros of taking the meds
did not outweigh the cons when I could still possibly get malaria.

------
kashrr
Sad that people did not care too much about this post. Living amidst all the
tech craziness it is easy to get caught up in the hype. Take some time to
introspect about the world we live in, look at the big picture and things that
really matter.

