Thomas R. Frieden Quotes

Over the years, I have worked on programs in Africa and around the globe to combat malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. I have been witness to incredible progress in these fights.

In the ongoing effort to combat Ebola, more needs to be done to rewrite the public-health narrative. It must move from one that has been infused with fear to one that recognizes the hope for survival that supportive care can offer infected people.

If you find diseases before they've really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.

I think if we can prevent a fatal disease, we should.

I mean we grew up in a TB bus and I became a TB doctor.

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they're major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.

Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it's really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.

The 2000 Durban conference prompted action, and since then, great strides have been made in global health and the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Only yesterday mankind lived in fear of the scourges of smallpox, cholera and plague that once swept nations before them. Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease. Today we are concerned with a different kind of hazard that lurks in our environment-a hazard we ourselves have introduced into our world as our modern way of life has evolved.

The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.

We can't fight AIDS unless we do much more to fight TB as well.

We have seen SARS stopped dead in its tracks.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there's an epidemic of chronic disease.

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.

We've actually eliminated Type II polio in the world, at least as far as we can tell.

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

When anyone dies from a preventable disease in New York City, it’s my fault.

Unequal development in different countries in the promotion of health and control of disease, especially communicable disease, is a common danger.

You better have your disease program in line. The bugs are evolving quicker than our anti-biotics.

I can attest to the very real potential for unnecessary pain, suffering, and death when the work of public-health officials is curtailed.

It’s not the mosquitoes who spread the disease [Zika]. Mosquitoes don’t travel more than 500 yards from where they are born. It’s the people. They travel.

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

A vaccine that prevented tuberculosis would merit a Nobel Prize, but it's just very difficult to develop.