Leila Lopes Quotes

Miriam Were has made outstanding contributions to public health in the developing world. She brings basic medical services to women and children in East Africa.

There are these very poor communities on the outskirts of Cairo called Mokattam, where a lot of the garbage collectors live. I used to volunteer there, doing health and education work when I was younger and living in Egypt.

We all ran barefooted on the dusty roads in our past, but now the Emperor wears shoes, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the barefooted child and the doting mother are afforded a holistic environment to realise their dreams and ambitions.

In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher, and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

The fight against Ebola cannot undermine the fight against poverty.

It will be impossible for us to eradicate HIV as long as any corner of the world is cut off from the education and services that we know helps stop the spread of this disease.

Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

I have the goal of getting together 30 or 40 poor kids and bringing them to live with me.

I was a TV producer at a noncommercial station, and we were producing some good documentaries - on Head Start, on poverty. But I was struck by the children, and the damage that poverty was doing to them. I didn't think filming them was helping much, so I wondered how we could use TV for them, to teach them.

India has an enormous amount of AIDS awareness.

Advances in science and medical research and public health policies have meant that life expectancy for Australians is one of the highest in the world.

Keeping children alive and free of disease is not a political issue and cannot be put into a partisan box.

We've taken on the major health problems of the poorest - tuberculosis, maternal mortality, AIDS, malaria - in four countries. We've scored some victories in the sense that we've cured or treated thousands and changed the discourse about what is possible.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it's one that's easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

Infant mortality and life expectancy are reasonable indicators of general well-being in a society.

I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labour. It perpetuates poverty. If children are deprived of education, they remain poor.

I begin with the premise that behavior is an incredibly important element in medicine. People's habits, their willingness to quit smoking, their willingness to take steps to avoid transmission of HIV, are all behavioral questions.

I enjoy being the messenger for God in terms of letting people know about HIV and AIDS.

Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

Right now I belong to the wonderful organization called The Children's Action Network. The first thing we did was immunize 200,000 children across the country against childhood diseases.

In the developing countries the United Nations doesn't mean frustration, confrontation or condemnation. It means environmental sanitation, agricultural production, telecommunications, the fight against illiteracy, the great struggle against poverty ignorance and disease.

Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education, proper nutrition.

When you have 25 percent of the city not being able to afford care, health becomes everyone's responsibility.... What is the moral responsibility of a hospital? Do you assure basic services for the many, or do you retain complex sophisticated services that tend to affect the relatively few?

Clean water and health care and school and food and tin roofs and cement floor, all of these things should constitute a set of basics that people must have as birthrights.