Thomas R. Frieden Quotes

It's understandable that when something new comes out that's unfamiliar, scary, and has severe outcomes, it gets a lot of media attention. In fact, the Zika outbreak is unprecedented. We've never before identified a mosquito-borne infection that can cause fetal malformations.

The possible impact of the virus [Zika] an extraordinary event and a public health threat to other parts of the world.

Just as the only reservoir for the typhus virus in nature is provided by man, so the only vector of infection is the louse. The bite of the louse is not virulent immediately after the infecting meal. It becomes so only towards the 7th day following infection.

Every health threat has a different nature and characteristic and appropriate response. Zika is a particular risk to pregnant women who reside in or thinking of traveling to places where Zika is spreading.

Since the first large Zika outbreak ever recognized, in 2007, the CDC has had boots on the ground responding. Our laboratories have developed a test that can confirm Zika in the first week of illness or in a sample from an affected child.

The bottom line is, if you're pregnant, don't travel to an area where Zika is spreading.

Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them.

Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent.

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.

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.

The belief is growing on me that the disease is communicated by the bite of the mosquito... She always injects a small quantity of fluid with her bite - what if the parasites get into the system in this manner.

Left to their own devices, epidemic diseases tend to follow the same basic process: A virus or bacteria infects a host, who typically becomes sick and in many cases dies. Along the way, the host infects others.

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

It's extremely likely that the people who have never been exposed to a human who has leprosy, it's very likely they got leprosy from exposure to an armadillo.

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.

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.

Malaria in Africa did not come from bad governance. It came from bad mosquitoes.

The mosquito has killed more people than anything else in history.

I could foresee some terrific political and legal battles if women find out they have Zika in the later terms of their pregnancy.

It’s not the mosquitoes who spread the disease [Zika]. Mosquitoes don’t travel more than 500 yards from where they are born. It’s the people. They travel.

The way Zika spreads is primarily through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in places that don't have screens and air-conditioning.

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

From all the available evidence, the body has an excellent immune response to Zika. Therefore, once you get it once, you will never get it again.

We don't know what we don't know about Ebola. We think we know it's a virus, but is it mutating? Can it be spread by airborne?