Margaret Chan Quotes

While Ebola's deadly reach has proven to be a complex and unique international challenge, the many uncertainties surrounding this virus continue to threaten U.S. national security.

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.

I've had to confront a lot of pandemics and infectious diseases around the globe.

Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.

More than 50 million people around the world died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That's why we have epidemiologists all over the world tracking whether new strains of flu emerge.

Pandemic influenza is by nature an international issue; it requires an international solution.

The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.

Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.

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.

The Ebola epidemic is the worst health emergency there has been in modern times.

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

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

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.

As demonstrated by the emergence of the Mexican swine flu in the U.S., infectious diseases have little respect for borders; helping developing countries detect and deal with their diseases is the surest way for us to protect ourselves from new and potentially devastating epidemics.

Of course when you look back from all the pandemics that have happened in the world, they were really scary.

It's critical that we engage the federal scientific community to further our understanding of COVID-19 as we work to keep communities safe and reduce the spread of the virus.

After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.

From the beginning, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has presented very difficult challenges.

What is the luck of the draw that me - me - who finally writes a book, it comes out in the - in the - in the time, in the center of the first pandemic, H1N1? And I'm going out on signings, and I'm going out to the public. This is the one time when I need to be hermetically sealed.

All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans. Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.

Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.

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.

New and emerging infections keep coming back and the world needs a collective defense system, and that requires international cooperation and collaboration, in the name of global solidarity.