How Bill Gates Believes Technology Can Improve Public Health In India And The World

Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates is currently on a three-day visit to India to supervise the work his foundation is carrying out here. And in an interview with the Times of India, he talked about how he believes technology can improve public health, among other topics.

For one thing, the interviewer asks Gates what he thinks about the situation of public health in India. And he says there's certainly positive stuff going on, but India still has a lot of work to do.

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Children in danger

"The India health story is a glass half full; that is, there's been huge progress," Gates says. "Childhood deaths have been brought down dramatically. Life expectancy is 10 years greater now than it was back in 1991. India has rolled out some of these new vaccines, the rotavirus vaccine, and over the next few years, we will figure out a plan to roll out the pneumococcus vaccine."

"Despite all that progress, and on some of the fronts, like nutrition, and in some parts of India, such as vaccine coverage rates, there's still work to be done. And our partnership with the government, the ministry of health, and some specific ones in states such as UP and Bihar, is about continuing to improve the health system. We can get the childhood death rates down even more, likewise the maternal death rates."

Keeping it clean

But that's just on the disease-fighting front, but the Microsoft CEO and his foundation are also very focused on disease-prevention. One of these is by improving public sanitation,especially in rural areas and among economically backward communities.

One of the toilet reinvention prototypes - Gates Foundation

"We are working on two kinds of innovations," Gates says. "One is the ability to process fecal sludge with a lower cost plant." He's basically talking about setting up smaller, more efficient waste processing plants, so they can be densely set up. But the Gates' Foundations biggest project at the moment is actually building toilets that can deal with human waste, without necessarily needing to be connected to a sewer system, or even having running water.

To that end, the foundation has given $3 million in grants to universities under the 'Reinvent the Toilet Challenge', for cheap, waterless toilets. Overall though, the Gates foundation has spent about $200 million on this project, and expects to spend another $200 million before they have a working model rather than just prototypes. But when that happens, the idea is they could install self-processing toilets across the world, including India, where people are otherwise defecating in the open, or pit latrines.

"We have lot of prototypes, but there's not a product there. Even when we get it, which we are optimistic we will in the next five years, it will take a lot of time to get the adoption." Hopefully though, it's something the foundation can work with the Indian government on, because it would save a lot of lives.

According to a WHO study from 2012, of the over 23 lakh annual deaths among children at the time, an estimated 3.34 lakh are thanks to diarrhoeal diseases. Rotavirus is the leading cause of that in children, which itself is spread thanks to improper sanitation and infected feces.

The big picture

Aside from immediate healthcare efforts though, Gates also believes technology can improve our long term health by tackling larger issues. For one, material science can help us come up with better carbon filters to try and reduce the amount of particulate matter we put into the environment from burning fossil fuels. That way perhaps in future people in Delhi and other Indian metros won't have to wear a mask just to be able to breathe while roaming the city. Even better, improvements in photovoltaic cells can make solar panels more efficient, thereby making it worthwhile for major corporations to switch over to solar energy.

"Technology has helped improve the human condition. Our lifespan is better than 200 years ago - electricity, transport, better seeds, vaccines for things like measles, and other childhood diseases," Gates says.

"Overall, I am a believer that most technologies can be shaped to have more benefits than negatives. Climate change is a particular challenge where India is a good example - should it build more coal plants, or can it get its electricity from other sources? I am very involved in trying to accelerate breakthrough ideas in climate change. I can't prove how easily that will go, but I do think it is great that we are getting a lot of smart people involved in these challenges."

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"I see technology, as if we shape it in the right way, very positive."

And that's just what Bill Gates is focused on, but the applications of technology to improve the world's condition are limitless. Can we use technology to stop the melting of polar ice, or even refreeze it? Can we develop machines or technology to help clean out the plastic we've dumped in our oceans? Better yet, can we use AI to figure out the most concrete changes we need to minimize global warming in the short term?

There's a lot that needs to be done, and far too smart people on working how to do it. But if we can get technology to do the work for us, we have a shot.