Thomas R. Frieden Quotes

Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

Once you catch a disease and survive, you can't get it again.

Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time.

If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.

The right raw materials can... double or triple the protective power of the immune system.

A carrier with a venereal disease can have many partners, but only those whose mental and physical immune systems are weak will be susceptible to it.

The nature of a protective immune response to HIV is still unclear. Because in a very, very unique manner, unlike virtually any other microbe with which we're familiar, the HIV virus has evolved in a way that the immune system finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the virus.

The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?

I demonstrated the characteristics of experimental fever. It appears after an incubation period which is never less than five days. It follows the same pattern as natural fever in man, but is of shorter duration and less pronounced.

When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an immune response, both an antibody response and a cellular response, to ultimately contain the microbe.

Left to their own devices, epidemic diseases tend to follow the same basic process: A virus or bacteria infects a host, who typically becomes sick and in many cases dies. Along the way, the host infects others.

If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact.

Roughly speaking, this hypothesis asks whether drug use causes some of the diseases officially associated with AIDS, such as immunodeficiency and Kaposi's sarcoma.

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.

There is an urgent need for a protective Ebola vaccine, and it is important to establish that a vaccine is safe and spurs the immune system to react in a way necessary to protect against infection.

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.

Many key concepts concerning the nature of immunity have originated from the very practical need to control virus infections.

There are too few people working in the area of viral pathogenesis and immunity, too little funding, too many problems, and too little time.

A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.

Every health threat has a different nature and characteristic and appropriate response. Zika is a particular risk to pregnant women who reside in or thinking of traveling to places where Zika is spreading.

It's understandable that when something new comes out that's unfamiliar, scary, and has severe outcomes, it gets a lot of media attention. In fact, the Zika outbreak is unprecedented. We've never before identified a mosquito-borne infection that can cause fetal malformations.

It is remarkable how surprising Zika has been. This is the first time we have had a mosquito-borne infection that can cause a devastating birth defect.

Smallpox can be personally devastating. After a 14-day incubation period, patients experience high fevers, headaches, and sometimes severe abdominal pain. A rash resembling chicken pox appears in the mouth and throat, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. As patients recover, scabs break and pitted scars appear.