Epidemiology Quotes

What the experts are telling me is that there's very little chance that Ebola is going to mutate into something that could spread directly through the air. The real concern is not whether Ebola could go airborne, but whether it could spread faster.

The first Care in building of Cities, is to make them airy and well perflated; infectious Distempers must necessarily be propagated amongst Mankind living close together.

The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs.

We want combination solutions at the state level, at the local level - whether we've learned from the Chinese about creating what we've been calling COVID wards - creating the ability to actually care for larger numbers of clients and patients in a more concentrated way which allows more oversights so we could really track patients.

Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases - which does not seem very likely.

I thought 'The Hot Zone' was fascinating, mesmerizing. It's one of the things that got me interested in Ebola.

As a physician for over 30 years, I am well aware of the dangers infectious diseases pose.

When you're dealing with new and emerging diseases, you have no idea and you can't predict in advance what would happen.

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.

The CDC is an integral part of our community and on the frontlines of our pandemic response, and we must continue to give them more tools to help keep our families safe and healthy.

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

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.

It's now evident that public health is part of national security.

Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.

One of my first priorities as a new member of Congress in 2019 was to visit the CDC and learn firsthand about what they needed to help protect Americans. After my visit, I learned their budget had previously been cut, and that they needed funding to modernize their data systems to help prevent pandemics and other public health crises.

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

I'm for increased funding for the Centers for Disease Control.

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

I am not opposed to scientists looking at all ways to combat and destroy the Zika virus.

There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?

Even though we know the origin of diseases, panic sweeps. It's one thing that frightens us, because it's your health and your body - it's more like a tangible threat; it's not like a foreign enemy you can fight. That was really what was uppermost to many of us whilst making 'Black Death.'

As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Disease is a non-partisan problems that requires a non-partisan solution.