Nathan Wolfe Quotes

If we can provide even a few months of early warning for just one pandemic, the benefits will outweigh all the time and energy we're devoting. Imagine preventing health crises, not just responding to them.

SARS was a very important event... And many countries have learned from SARS... The SARS event sort of gave them additional impetus and the sense of urgency for them to really revise the International Health Regulations.

To be able to detect the outbreak of avian flu anywhere in the world is going to require a partnership of several countries that will share information and samples, but it is important to remember a threat anywhere is a threat everywhere.

Anything you say before a pandemic occurs sounds alarmist; anything you say after it occurs is inadequate.

From West Nile to swine flu to Ebola to the global outbreak of dengue fever, the capacity to deal with threats like Zika must be designed into our preparedness posture.

One of my first priorities as a new member of Congress in 2019 was to visit the CDC and learn firsthand about what they needed to help protect Americans. After my visit, I learned their budget had previously been cut, and that they needed funding to modernize their data systems to help prevent pandemics and other public health crises.

I don't think you just can put people on the starting block and then wait... for the next Ebola-like epidemic. I think that you need somehow a small-capacity response who's going to run the first few kilometers of the marathon.

The Ebola epidemic can serve as an early warning wake-up call to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.

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

There is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic.

New and emerging infections keep coming back and the world needs a collective defense system, and that requires international cooperation and collaboration, in the name of global solidarity.

For a pandemic of moderate severity, this is one of our greatest challenges: helping people to understand when they do not need to worry, and when they do need to seek urgent care.

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.

Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia.

Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

If you find diseases before they've really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.

Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.

As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.

We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.

Technologies will reach the developed world first, but the rest of the world will benefit in turn. And it will behoove the rich countries to hasten the spread of its innovations. In an era when new diseases can circle the globe in hours, it’s in everyone’s interest to stop the next pandemic before it happens.

History has told us that no one can stop a pandemic. The question is: when is it going to happen? I don't think anybody has the answer to it. We have to be on the lookout for any time, any day.

We’re in a globalized world and the risk [of epidemics] is shared..

Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.

More than 50 million people around the world died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That's why we have epidemiologists all over the world tracking whether new strains of flu emerge.

As demonstrated by the emergence of the Mexican swine flu in the U.S., infectious diseases have little respect for borders; helping developing countries detect and deal with their diseases is the surest way for us to protect ourselves from new and potentially devastating epidemics.