Scott Gottlieb Quotes

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Smallpox is the only human infectious disease ever eradicated by science.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

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.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

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 fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.

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

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.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

Anthrax, it's something that gets you sick, it's horrible, strong. It's a heavy-metal band name if there ever was one.

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.

We had a week off in the middle of shooting, but as soon as everyone stopped, we all went down with six different types of flu and other unmentionable diseases.

I sing and play the guitar, and I'm a walking, talking bacterial infection.

Humankind is no stranger to calamitous outbreaks of diseases.

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.

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

The border patrol gave us a list of the diseases that they're concerned about, and Ebola was one of those.

In 'Pox: An American History,' Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.