Eve Ensler Quotes

We know Africa does not have the same medical treatments as we do.

A child gets a fever in the United States and it's high enough and sustainable enough, all of us can bring a child to an emergency room. Most Haitians never had that opportunity. They didn't have the emergency room to bring them to. Virtually every time your child has 102 fever, you wait for it to die and you have no clean water to give it.

There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer.

I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background.

No other health disparity is so stark; virtually every woman who dies giving birth lives in a poor country.

In the United States, Western Europe and Japan, there is widespread access to dialysis, most of it publicly funded. But in many countries, the majority of patients who need dialysis die without it.

I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.

If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate healthcare to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations.

The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.

My mother, father, stepmother and surrogate mother have all died of cancer; my best friend has got terminal cancer and at least five of my other friends have had cancer but survived it.

I got a taste when I was in Kenya a while ago of what medical care was in rural Africa. I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.

Being in a field like healthcare, for me, as someone who is basically on a mission to make a global impact in terms of affordable access to healthcare, I am very, very concerned about the fact that there are a large number of people in this world who need to have some access to basic rights, whether it is in education or healthcare.

Stopping TB requires a government program that functions every day of the year, and that's hard in certain parts of the world. And partly it's because of who tuberculosis affects: It tends to affect the poor and disenfranchised most.

I know firsthand how our being such a rural state presents challenges to healthcare.

The very rich, very poor, and the very famous get the worst medical care. The very rich can buy it, the very poor can't get any, and the very famous can dictate it.

Medical disenfranchisement is fueled by a host of factors that include worsening shortage of primary care doctors in needy communities and a troubling scarcity of providers willing to treat the uninsured or publicly insured. Adding to the trend are fewer medical students choosing primary care over more lucrative and specialized fields.

Doctors said that the test most commonly used to screen for colon cancer doesn't go far enough. They're recommending a procedure that involves photographing the entire colon. I say, don't vie CBS an idea for another reality show.

A new report says that dogs can sniff out prostate cancer with almost 98 percent accuracy. The report also finds that cats can sniff it out with 100 percent accuracy but they prefer to watch you die.

Communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women.

Very few people around the world know that cancer kills more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined - until we get everyone to realize that, it will be tough to get them to act.

In Canada the cancer death rate is 16% higher than in the U.S. because of rationing of medical care. It takes an eight week wait to get radiation therapy for cancer.

Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.

If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.

I think public health is kind of in a very sad state of affairs here in this country.

There are whole states where people [with addiction or mental health issues] can't get to a doctor. If that were true of pancreatic cancer, if that were true of heart disease, if that were true of diabetes, we'd all understand that it made no sense at all. And yet we somehow approach mental health from a very different standard.