Kat Ley

And that was a group that was set up actually in the wake of that big Ebola outbreak in 2016 to look at

whether the world was becoming safer from outbreaks of infectious diseases.

And it found actually, no, not meaningfully safe.

It's quite scary.

On some measures, things have changed.

So we have new drugs.

We have new scientific advances.

You have changes to the way countries cooperate.

But at the same time, you have things like the U.S.

withdrawing from that kind of global system of

You have, particularly post-COVID, this kind of fragmentation, this huge growth in mistrust, in misinformation.

And so those are kind of counterbalancing those advances and making it seem as if maybe we're not actually in a better place than we were before COVID or before that big Ebola outbreak.

Part of what's happening now is that we're getting better at spotting these outbreaks.

But yes, they are becoming more frequent, and that's got a number of drivers.

You have a changing climate, which is perhaps making better conditions for certain pathogens.

You have...

people encroaching on what was once wild space.

And so getting closer to, you know, whether it's the bats or the rats that harbor these viruses, you have a much more interconnected world.

So people can hop on a plane and be on the other side of the planet in a matter of hours.

Whereas once upon a time,