Disease Prevalence Quotes

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.

Aside from all that, we recall that antibodies to malaria and other diseases prevalent in Africa show up as HIV-positive on tests.

Mental illness can happen to anybody. You can be a dustman, a politician, a Tesco worker... anyone. It could be your dad, your brother or your aunt.

This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs.

I have family members who live in Africa. Because of the family that lives there, I know what is happening in these countries, and it seems so silly to me that diseases like malaria are so prevalent when they are entirely preventable. Yet children are still dying every 35 seconds.

In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.

I'm over there filming in South Africa now, and two in five are HIV-positive now. Not many people know that.

We labor under the fatal delusion that no disease can be cured without medicine. This has been responsible for more mischief to mankind than any other evil. ...Disease increases in proportion to the increase to the number of doctors in a place.

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?

If you live long enough, sooner or later everybody you know has cancer.

Hansen’s disease”—that’s the other modern name, I guess, for leprosy—“Hansen’s disease was so rare in the America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy

After lunch we went into the garden for coffee and I turned on the Surgeon-General with his graphics, percentages etc. of sick and wounded to entertain the Premier.

... each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.

Cancer affects so many people, and even if it hasn't affected someone in your family then you know someone who has had it.

The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.

Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.

So here's the situation confronting the drug firms: The drugs cost more to make, but they can't charge more for them. What do they do? Increasingly, the U.S. market is driving them toward drugs aimed at the diseases of richer, older Americans and away from antimicrobials, vaccines, and the like.

The March of Dimes turned a disease not nearly as prevalent as childhood cancer into a national crusade. Polio was not that widespread.

Disease increases in proportion to the increase in the number of doctors in a place.

I've been in Africa, and I've been to hospitals of Africa, and they're not hospitals, they're places where people go to die. And rows and rows and rows of people just dying and the waiting rooms of the hospitals are full of people waiting to get into the beds of the people who died the night before, and they're dying from unnecessary diseases.

Eighty percent of Americans with HIV do not know they are infected.

Mozambique is having an economic resurgence but still four out of 10 people there have HIV or AIDS...There's astounding conditions but what I was left with...was the power of the human spirit there and the fact these people have been through so much and they were still dancing in the streets

There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

Cervical cancer doesn't discriminate by how much money you have. The disease affects so many - it's frightening.