David Nabarro Quotes

With over 20 million residents and 100 million tourists, we must stay ahead of the possible spread of the Zika virus and take immediate action to ensure Florida is prepared.

If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.

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

People may have said that without symptoms, you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses.

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.

We have seen SARS stopped dead in its tracks.

Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.

Know that the tiger mosquito - Aedes albopictus - sometimes spreads viruses that spread like Zika, so it may be able to spread Zika.

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.

The fact is we can't prevent people from getting the COVID-19 virus.

I think the world should unite and focus on strong health systems to prepare the whole world to prevent epidemics - or if there is an outbreak, to manage it quickly - because viruses don't respect borders, and they don't need visas.

Covid spreads too easily to think it can be confined to the young.

Or, if I take that same auditorium and I make it much bigger and put more space between seats, it'll be quieter because it's much harder when you're not in physical contact with people to spread a virus from person-to-person, right? There are all sorts of patterns that we see in epidemiology that help us understand why something spreads.

The virus in the movie 'Contagion' is based on the bird flu which came out of nowhere back in 2008. Everyone thought it was going to change the way we live and it just faded away. Wait a minute, I'm talking about President Obama.

Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it's really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.

Liability is being assessed against companies who inadvertently have shipped a virus to another company. Rather than risk the incredibly bad PR, these companies fork over.

In 2015, El Salvador suffered nearly 50,000 cases of dengue. Cuba had 1641 cases, no deaths, and one of the lowest incidence rates in the Americas.

The CDC and the federal government have already admitted that they have failed to get ahead of the spread of Ebola in Texas, and we aren't going to let that happen in Florida.

The Ebola epidemic was the most frightening outbreak I have witnessed in my lifetime, and I believe it was necessary to react globally as strongly as we did.

Why do our kids need to be protected from flu? Isn't that something only for the cold western countries who have long, cold, below-zero winters? That's what I thought until I learnt that India's tropical weather facilitates circulation of viruses around the year, unlike the West, which sees a peak only during winter.

Nations don't have friends; they have interests. The best motivation for a state to act if it is remote from an epidemic is if its own security is at risk.

It's important to protect the old and the vulnerable, who are at the highest risk of severe illness and bad outcomes. But like most issues of medicine, it isn't a binary choice. Given the uncertainties of how this virus spreads and its high risk of infirmities, it would be unwise to abandon efforts to limit Covid spread wherever possible.

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.

My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this - to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people around the globe.

One thing about Covid-19 is clear: We don't fully understand its severity and transmission. At various turns, we've both underestimated and overestimated the virus.