Richard Quest Quotes

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

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

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

After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.

Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent.

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

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

History has told us that no one can stop a pandemic. The question is: when is it going to happen? I don't think anybody has the answer to it. We have to be on the lookout for any time, any day.

The Ebola epidemic was the most frightening outbreak I have witnessed in my lifetime, and I believe it was necessary to react globally as strongly as we did.

Humankind is no stranger to calamitous outbreaks of diseases.

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

From the beginning, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has presented very difficult challenges.

My father, who had previously been a civil engineer, died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918.

We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.

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

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 idea of infection began to be taken far more seriously than it ever had before. Hospitals transformed themselves in response to the new plague - sometimes for the better, but often for the worse, as when, in fear, they cast their ulcerated patients out into the streets.

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.

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

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.

In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.

From a population point of view, it's actually very important that as few people as possible get the flu. People getting the flu is not a private matter. The risk for healthy people is really about your friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.

While Ebola's deadly reach has proven to be a complex and unique international challenge, the many uncertainties surrounding this virus continue to threaten U.S. national security.