Irwin Redlener Quotes

If smallpox were a threat just to individuals, then it could be left up to individuals to decide whether or not they want to protect themselves.

I don't want to be in the clubhouse, if I have the coronavirus or something like that, coming into the clubhouse and spread to everybody, that's not good, right?

When most members of a community are vaccinated, they protect those who are not by eliminating the viral reservoirs in the population. The effect is known as 'herd immunity.'

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

You no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isn't a private choice but a civic obligation.

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.

Those people who get the flu shot not only protect themselves from getting the flu or reducing their likelihood of developing the flu, but those around them.

Think about old people; think about young people, those with immune system problems. They can't really protect themselves well against the flu, so by you limiting the spread of the flu and getting vaccinated, you're helping protect them as well.

Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children.

I’m from the health department. You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary? This fella’s got enough typhoid to start his own colony.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

If you really want to isolate a disease, then you have to isolate the people who carry it.

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity.

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.