Alan Huffman Quotes

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

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.

The Ebola epidemic is the worst health emergency there has been in modern times.

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

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

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

More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard or seen since the beginning of time …. Whoever touched the sick and dead was immediately infected and died …. That pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein.

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

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.

Pandemic influenza is by nature an international issue; it requires an international solution.

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.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

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.

The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.

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.

I'm tired of being behind this virus. We've been behind this virus from day one. We underestimated this virus. It's more powerful, it's more dangerous than we expected.

Zika is an addressable threat. While it falls outside of the regular routine of public health preparedness, we shouldn't be scrambling for new resources each time a threat like Zika starts to emerge.

'Contagion' should serve as a wake-up call not only about the germs, but perhaps more importantly about the frailty of governance, nationally and worldwide.

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.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

My fear is that if we don't take remedial steps to control polio in the tribal areas, we will be faced with international sanctions.

We have seen SARS stopped dead in its tracks.

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.

Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.