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Once again pandemic is the leading cat risk. It was the leading cat risk last year. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj0/2013_survey_results/aekk It was the leading cat risk the year before that. http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/7xz0
Pandemics are the risk LWers are most afraid of and to my knowledge we as a community have expended almost no effort on preventing them.
So this year I resolve that my effort towards pandemic prevention will be greater than simply posting a remark about how it's the leading risk.
I'm not so sure about that. Isn't the effective altruist focus on global poverty/disease reducing the risk of pandemic? I know very little about epidemiology, but if seems as if a lot of scary diseases (AIDs, ebola...) would never have spread to the human population if certain regions of the third world had better medical infrastructure.
That's fair. It's certianly true that poverty reduction also reduces pandemic risk. But it does so inditectly and slowly. There are probably faster ways to reduce pandemic risk than working on poverty.