Halfdan Mahler Quotes

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

AIDS didn’t announce itself when it arrived, and it was only after it started taking its toll that we realized our problem.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

AIDS is the biggest challenge, the major disaster facing this country and we would have wished for something more specific and far-reaching.

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.

I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don't think the word 'AIDS' came out until '84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn't know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.

Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.

Influenza killed more people in September, October, and November of 1918 than AIDS killed in all the years since it entered the human population.

AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.

I started to write about science and medicine at the 'Washington Post,' in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.

I was a gay man living in the epicenter of 20th-century America's worst health epidemic.

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.

I remember specifically, in the summer of 2002, the rate of women infected with HIV/AIDS was beginning to match the rate of men, and nobody was talking about it. It was as if it was on nobody else's radar. I had made up my mind to do something about it.

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

The spread of the disease is under control. What I worry about is the spread of fear of the disease is not under control.

I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent's is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.

I don't think we are comforted by the fact that we were told there would never be a case of Ebola in the United States and obviously that's not correct.

I fight AIDS because it's a killer disease, destroys the human race in all fields.

Influenza is a serious disease. Kids die of influenza, both in Japan and the United States, and if you give a drug to people who are at risk of dying, there will be people who die who got the drug,... There is no signal the drug is doing it as opposed to the disease.

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.

If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.

And if you're not going to have a clear health threat, you don't want to panic people.

It entered Egypt at the end of the season when the grasslands turn green, hence in the autumn of the year 748…This epidemic was distinctive in that it did not particularly affect one region and leave another untouched but spread to all parts of the Earth, in the East as in the West…Furthermore, it encompassed not just the human species but also the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the animals in the field…

We are fighting a deadly disease. We are not fighting the people who have that disease. Homosexuality does not produce AIDS.