Sylvia Mathews Burwell Quotes

The Ebola epidemic can serve as an early warning wake-up call to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.

Microbial foes have the advantage of an extraordinary capacity to rapidly reproduce and adapt, thereby propagating themselves even in the face of impressive advances in public health and the availability of countermeasures such as diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. This inherent adaptability of microbes can only be matched with the continual application of wit and technological capability. The best defense for the human species against elimination by the ever-evolving waves of microbial pathogens are public health measures coordinated with biomedical research that will continue to provide innovative tools to counterbalance these endless microbial challenges. Ultimately, if medical science continues to fight the microbial foes to a draw, as has occurred for much of the past century, humanity will have won.

We can’t make our own flu shots? We have chem labs everywhere. In the late 60’s we made LSD…and we can’t make flu shots?

Avian flu, which has already killed 50 people, is only a mutation away from being transmissible from person to person. We have no immunity, no vaccines, and no cure. It is imperative that we strengthen our domestic vaccine supply, expand legal protections, encourage collaboration between the public and private sectors, and advance research and development. These initiatives will help protect us from a deadly viral outbreak that experts warn could come to our shores any day.

There is a cost for investing in pandemic preparedness, but a much bigger cost for not investing in it.

The Ebola virus is unlike any health crisis we have ever experienced and needs a response unlike anything we have ever seen.

In the ongoing effort to combat Ebola, more needs to be done to rewrite the public-health narrative. It must move from one that has been infused with fear to one that recognizes the hope for survival that supportive care can offer infected people.

It’s useful to compare our preparations for epidemics with our preparations for war.

This outbreak is moving ahead of efforts to control it.

We all have a stake in the battle against Ebola.

How we deal with the AIDS epidemic should be one of the greatest ways that the world gets measured. The report card for this era.

If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.

We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging.

We can't predict when infectios diseases will break out, but their breakout is inevitable. That is why we must be prepared.

I'm tired of being behind this virus. We've been behind this virus from day one. We underestimated this virus. It's more powerful, it's more dangerous than we expected.

Since the first large Zika outbreak ever recognized, in 2007, the CDC has had boots on the ground responding. Our laboratories have developed a test that can confirm Zika in the first week of illness or in a sample from an affected child.

The difference is that with Ebola, it is such a devastating disease, and there is still no cure. They're still working on vaccines. The fact of the matter with polio, there is a cure; there is a vaccine.

The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting is the perfect place for a dialogue that brings together industry, civil society, U.N. agencies, and countries around a shared response to the challenge of protecting children against vaccine-preventable illness.

Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.

Soon after joining the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, I was called upon as part of team to respond to a malaria outbreak. My team was dispatched to a village in southwestern Ethiopia, where I not only observed the malaria epidemic's shocking effects on adults and children but also experienced it first-hand.

The response to coronavirus has shown what can be done when governments put their mind to it.

My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this - to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people around the globe.

The history books will remember the Chinese doctors who sounded the alarm about COVID-19.

Coronavirus may well represent the biggest health crisis any of us experience in our lifetimes.

In spite of the tireless efforts of our scientist, it is possible that we may never find a successful coronavirus vaccine.