Richard Dawkins Quotes

As medical research continues and technology enables new breakthroughs, there will be a day when malaria and most all major deadly diseases are eradicated on Earth.

Medicine has changed greatly in the last decades. Widespread vaccinations have practically eradicated many illnesses, at least in western Europe and the United States. The use of chemotherapy, especially the antibiotics, has contributed to an ever decreasing number of fatalities in infectious diseases.

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.

I think children should be vaccinated because that affects the health of all the other children.

I hope that some day the practice of producing cowpox in human beings will spread over the world - when that day comes, there will be no more smallpox.

Science is beginning to catch up with global health problems.

Infectious diseases have become less prominent as causes of death and disability in regions of improved sanitation and adequate supplies of antibiotics.

Universal vaccination may well be the greatest success story in medical history.

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

You no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isn't a private choice but a civic obligation.

The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs.

Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.

I think that the discoveries of antibiotics and vaccines have contributed to the improvement of the quality of life, making it possible to prevent contagious diseases.

The health of the people is of supreme importance. All measures looking to their protection against the spread of contagious diseases and to the increase of our sanitary knowledge for such purposes deserve attention of Congress.

As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.

We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.

I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles.

If smallpox were a threat just to individuals, then it could be left up to individuals to decide whether or not they want to protect themselves.

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

We can't predict when infectios diseases will break out, but their breakout is inevitable. That is why we must be prepared.

Vaccination is the single most important step people can take to protect themselves from influenza.

As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.

Health is really important to me and my family. It's something that we value and that I strive for on a daily basis. MedImmune, the makers of Flumist Quadrivalent, knew about that and knew how important health is for me, so it was a no brainer for me to collaborate with them.

Over and over, nature shows that it's a really tough adversary. That's why it's important that we invest in laboratories, disease detectives, research, mosquito control, the public health system around the world to find, stop, track, prevent health threats.