Gene Mauch Quotes

Part of my job at 'The Economist' was writing about HIV, and that included the grim task of reporting on the state of the global epidemic.

What the experts are telling me is that there's very little chance that Ebola is going to mutate into something that could spread directly through the air. The real concern is not whether Ebola could go airborne, but whether it could spread faster.

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.

I don't think people really take pneumonia seriously when they hear it. But people really die from pneumonia: kids, older people, even just regular-aged people. They just die from pneumonia.

This is an industry that doesn't have the common cold... It has cholera.

The flu is very unpredictable when it begins and in how it takes off.

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease.

There are two things that I put my focus on. One is the fight against AIDS and finding a cure. The other is human rights.

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

In today's world, new infections and diseases can spread across the country and even across the world in a matter of days, or even hours, making early detection critical.

On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitoes fed on malarial.

From a population point of view, it's actually very important that as few people as possible get the flu. People getting the flu is not a private matter. The risk for healthy people is really about your friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.

I believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.

The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress…

AIDS didn’t announce itself when it arrived, and it was only after it started taking its toll that we realized our problem.

Malaria in Africa did not come from bad governance. It came from bad mosquitoes.