Margaret Chan Quotes

The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are. It basically shows us that the end of the road isn't very far away for antibiotics.

MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain.

Some countries that grow lots of pork, like Denmark and the Netherlands, are either eliminating antibiotics or reducing them. We have to do that. Otherwise we'll create such antibiotic resistance, it will be just terrible.

At a time of multiple calamities in the world, we cannot allow the loss of essential antimicrobials, essential cures for many millions of people, to become the next global crisis.

In learning to utilize antibiotics for the control of human and animal diseases, the medical and veterinary professions have acquired powerful tools for combating infections and epidemics.

I grew up on antibiotics. Every ailment - sore throats, earaches, flus - warranted a trip to the doctor and in most cases some kind of prescription.

Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.

Reducing MRSA infections is critical because these bacteria are difficult to treat and are common in healthcare settings, especially among ICU (intensive care unit) patients.

MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is an important cause of healthcare-associated infections.

It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.

Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.

We've been scared from using antibiotics and antivirals out of some kind of weird sense of communal responsibility to keep bugs naive to our powerful weapons.

Why do physicians prescribe powerful antibiotics? Generally not because our patients ask for them. Most people who come in with a sore throat would be just as happy leaving my office with a prescription for Chloraseptic as clarithromycin.

When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant.

There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.

We have grown accustomed to the wonders of clean water, indoor plumbing, laser surgery, genetic engineering, artificial joints, replacement body parts, and the much longer lives that accompany them. Yet we should remember that the vast majority of humans ever born died before the age of 10 from an infectious disease.

When we faced a possibility here in New York of chemical and biological attack, three days after September 11, I called in all of the experts, academic experts, Nobel Prize laureates, and doctors who had dealt with anthrax, doctors who had dealt with various forms of chemical and biological attack.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

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.

Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child's death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

It did not seem likely that I was destined to undertake research on typhus.

Antibiotics are a very serious public health problem for us, and it's getting worse. Resistant microbes outstrip new antibiotics. It's an ongoing problem. It's not like we can fix it, and it's over. We have to fight continued resistance with a continual pipeline of new antibiotics and continue with the perpetual challenge.

While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.

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.