Epidemic Management Quotes

We've all learned about this disease since it was first discovered several years ago in Europe. And so I think we've learned from the European experience.

Containment doesn't work. Containment does buy time. It could slow. It very well could slow the spread. But while you're slowing the spread, you better be doing something in parallel to be prepared for when that virus breaks out.

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

The fact is not kill entire populations is able to infect entire regions of land and control the only cure.

Although it is still important to develop an HIV vaccine, we have significant tools already at our disposal that can make a major impact on the trajectory of this epidemic.

During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox.

I believe UNAIDS' provocative leadership has been critical in addressing the AIDS epidemic and converting it from a death sentence to a chronic health condition.

I think AIDS can be won. I think we can win this fight. It is winnable. But it means behavior change.

When we can get the incidence of HIV down enough to turn the trajectory of the pandemic, it will assume a momentum of its own in diminishing HIV.

Without strong health systems in place, the higher the population density, the more difficult it becomes to prevent and control outbreaks, and not just because of the increased risk of contagion.

I think we didn't recognize how hard it would be to care for someone with Ebola who was desperately ill in the U.S., and how much hands-on nursing care there would be, and we didn't expect two nurses to get infected.

There is a tendency to attack some particular group of people and scapegoat them, but this is not the right attitude to cope with epidemics.

We feel confident that there won't be an outbreak. The people who were around the patient are now being identified and traced by the CDC and by the state health authorities. ... you get people, you identify them, and you observe and monitor them daily to determine if they develop symptoms If they do, then you put them under isolation to determine if, in fact, they are infected. And if you do that properly, you can shut down any outbreak.

We can sharply deflect the curve of HIV incidence.

The trouble is it's very difficult to pin-point the most important thing because Aids affects everyone in different levels of society, differently and you have to respond to it differently.