Melinda Gates Quotes

Communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women.

Women's health is one of WHO's highest priorities.

Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute.

When Mrs. Bush was First Lady, she went all over the Mideast talking about breast cancer awareness and the need for early screening. She did this in places where the cultures prohibit such discussion or even detection efforts.

My efforts to join the fight against breast cancer all began around the fact that women were getting short-changed in the medical arena.

Tackling malaria in a country like the Central African Republic is a huge uphill battle, and my experiences there have been a healthy dose of reality, fueling my own sense of urgency to do my part in reducing the preventable suffering of the incredible women I met.

Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That's more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

No other health disparity is so stark; virtually every woman who dies giving birth lives in a poor country.

Investing in women and girls may once have been considered a radical notion or even a waste of resources, but in most places in the world today, women and girls are increasingly recognized as a critical link to greater prosperity, political stability, better health and public policy.

One out of every 100 American men is HIV positive. The rate of infection has reached epidemic proportions in 40 developing nations.

I want us to be judged by the impact we have on the health of the people of Africa and the health of women. Improvements in the health of the people of Africa and the health of women are key indicators of the performance of WHO. This is a health organization for the whole world... But we must focus our attention on the people in greatest need.

Dementia is not exclusively a problem of the developed world.

In the developing world, it's about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.

Adults worldwide can today look forward to a life-expectancy of 60 plus. But not young Pakistani women: they die like flies, daily, during childbirth...

When the health of a woman is involved I think the government has to be respectful.

It is a very sad day for America when political ideology overrules good science and public health practices. The Food and Drug Administration has denied allowing the emergency contraception drug Plan B to be sold over-the-counter—ignoring its own panel of expert physicians, scientists and public health professionals who had voted overwhelmingly in favor of making the drug available over-the-counter … This pandering to right wing radicals will lead to more unwanted pregnancy, more abortions, and another step backwards for the women of our country.

Your action means that the U.S. government will control what non-governmental recipients of U.S. international family planning assistance do and say with their own funds. You have imposed on the poorest women of the world a halt to information that women in the United States are guaranteed.

When contraceptive services are not available to women throughout the world, abortion rates increase.

[Developing country] sweatshops, where the conditions are admittedly appalling by Western standards, represent an improvement -- often a significant improvement -- over the alternatives available to their workers. To boycott them or impose other significant additional costs on them makes life worse for many poor people by depriving them of relatively good jobs. This is especially true for women in the developing world, for whom rural life is often far worse than industrial labor in cities.

It makes perfect economic sense to integrate women in the economy in the developing world in order to catch up with advanced countries, thereby minimising socioeconomic costs as well.

I actually believe we are the superior gender. Why are we superior? Statistically, we outlive men by a good 10 years. No one should underestimate the power of nagging - it's on par with nuclear weapons.

The movement across Canada to fight toxic chemicals is a women's movement. It's a concern about health; it's very intimate.

We had a segment called Tampon Tuesdays that I was very proud of; that was hilarious because there are a lot of women's issues out there that a lot of people don't know about because they're not women, and they don't have to go through them.

In the United States, I feel like polio doesn't exist, but it very much does. I've been to many countries and saw how lucky we are that we can go straight to the doctor or the ER in the U.S. I would love for moms in other countries to not experience my fears.