Bill Frist Quotes

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

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

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

This syndrome, SARS, is now a worldwide health threat... The world needs to work together to find its cause, cure the sick and stop its spread.

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.

History has told us that no one can stop a pandemic. The question is: when is it going to happen? I don't think anybody has the answer to it. We have to be on the lookout for any time, any day.

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

Infectious diseases ... have probably been the most dangerous of enemies of mankind, much more so than war and mass murder. When one studies the constant epidemics of the past and the deficiency diseases on land and at sea, one realizes that the whole of civilization could have succumbed, and one is constantly surprised that mankind has survived.

We’re in a globalized world and the risk [of epidemics] is shared..

People don’t take it [the Zika Virus] seriously…. They haven’t seen any babies with microcephaly, YET!

Covid-19 may be here for a long time.

Strong health and disease surveillance systems halt epidemics that take lives, disrupt economies, and pose global health security threats.

I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.

I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there.

If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, miles deep, around a focus of a virus.

There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is an institute of the National Institutes of Health that is responsible predominantly for basic and clinical research in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of immunologic and infectious diseases.

Today we know the best way to prevent the spread of Ebola infection is through public health measures.

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.

Pandemics happen. When they do, they change the world.

Global pandemics---whether naturally occurring or intentionally spread---pose a greater threat than most man-made weapons of mass destruction.

Anything you say before a pandemic occurs sounds alarmist; anything you say after it occurs is inadequate.