Thomas R. Frieden Quotes

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.

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

People don’t take it [the Zika Virus] seriously…. They haven’t seen any babies with microcephaly, YET!

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.

We know Zika's not going to go on vacation.

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

It is remarkable how surprising Zika has been. This is the first time we have had a mosquito-borne infection that can cause a devastating birth defect.

In the U.S, Zika outbreaks are hopefully going to be easy to isolate. The biggest threat is likely to be from the fear Zika sows, especially among expectant moms.

First, the federal government, one of the fundamental responsibilities that it has is to protect the nation's health and wellbeing. And this [Zika virus] is a threat to public health in the United States. It is a very serious disease.

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.

We can't be playing around with these issues [Zika disease], because this can become very serious very quickly, as we have seen in Brazil and other countries. The funds are going to be used at the state level, but it is important for the federal government to cooperate in the federal government's role.

We need a malaria epidemic in the blogging community! Either that or we need people who have seen the malaria epidemic to start blogging.

This is an industry that doesn't have the common cold... It has cholera.

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

You can have an epidemic in a state. You can have it in a region. You can have it in a country where the critical level of disease passes a certain threshold, and we call that an 'epidemic threshold.'

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 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.

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

Zika could become the newest flashpoint in America’s debate on abortion. With nearly 1,000 pregnant women in the U.S. infected with Zika and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advising all expectant mothers to be screened for exposure to the virus, the USA is beginning to get a hint about why the issue became so contentious in Latin America this year.

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.

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.

Soon after joining the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, I was called upon as part of team to respond to a malaria outbreak. My team was dispatched to a village in southwestern Ethiopia, where I not only observed the malaria epidemic's shocking effects on adults and children but also experienced it first-hand.

The border patrol gave us a list of the diseases that they're concerned about, and Ebola was one of those.

I think we have other things to worry about than some Zika virus.