Phil Gingrey Quotes

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

In today's world, new infections and diseases can spread across the country and even across the world in a matter of days, or even hours, making early detection critical.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

Pandemics happen. When they do, they change the world.

Global pandemics---whether naturally occurring or intentionally spread---pose a greater threat than most man-made weapons of mass destruction.

Of course when you look back from all the pandemics that have happened in the world, they were really scary.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

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

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.

Ebola is a nasty disease to get. It's scary. But as a weapon, it is probably not likely. Ebola is a difficult malady to weaponize and deliver efficiently.

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

With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.

What do we know about the diseases carried by illegal aliens? Not much, thanks to government secrecy, but we know enough to be worried.

Humankind is no stranger to calamitous outbreaks of diseases.

We live in a world at constant risk of public health emergencies. In our increasingly interconnected world, public health emergencies can affect anyone, anywhere.

In 'Pox: An American History,' Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.

My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea.

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.

The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.

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

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

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.'

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.