Healthcare Advancements Quotes

In 1955, Cuba had a life expectancy of 59.5 years, shorter than Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay… In 1985 the average Cuban could expect to live until the age of 75, longer than anyone else in Latin America and just short of the average American (75.9 years). Cuba’s children were the best fed and the level of literacy was the highest [in Latin America].

Scientists and companies weren't creating things like new vaccines. Now that we have this fund that's there to buy at the lowest price, but buy for those people these medicines, we see scientists everywhere coming up with those new tools.

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?

Advances in technology and in our understanding of illness and disease together with an expanded workforce and greater resources will allow us to provide more services to a higher quality.

I'll get to see many disease eradications. and we're seeing a lot of progress.

We believe unbelievable progress can be made, in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them.

One of the things that got me on this topic for this book was that when I was researching the column I wrote in 2009 saying that I was stepping down from my column at "Newsweek" because I wanted to make room for newer, fresh voices out there, I discovered that in the year I was born, 1952, the average life expectancy of an American was 68. I was shocked by that figure and every time I mention it I hear a gasp from somebody in the crowd. Now, of course, we're more or less at 80, so that means that we've gotten 12 additional years.

So not only are we saving lives now, we're creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down.

Despite its potential, the federal government has restricted funding for creating new cell lines - putting the burden of any future research squarely on the shoulders of the private sector. Government's most basic responsibility, however, is the health and welfare of its people, so it has a duty to encourage appropriate scientific investigations that could possibly save the lives of millions.

Great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.

Life expectancy in America is about 79, we should be able to live to 92. Somewhere along the line, we're leaving 13 years on the table. So my quest is -- how do we get those extra 13 years? And how do we make those extra 13 years good years?

Now we've got that [children's death rate] down to about 5 percent, so we've more than cut it in half, and that's because we're getting vaccines out, economic improvement also helps there, but the vaccines are why we've seen an acceleration in getting that down.

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.

Most people are not updated. 50 years ago 1 in 5 children died before age 5, now only 1 in 20!

Medicine is a science which hath been (as we have said) more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced: the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression. For I find much iteration, but small addition. It considereth causes of diseases, with the occasions or impulsions; the diseases themselves, with the accidents; and the cures, with the preservation.

When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives.

Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.

I don't know who had the bright idea of teaching pneumonia how to walk, but I'd like to find that dunderhead before he decides he wants to teach it how to drive.

Every cent that goes to research is changing the lives of patients and their families right now.

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.

Countless people, suffering from many different diseases, stand to benefit from the answers stem cell research can provide. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to do everything in our power to find cures for these diseases - and soon. As I've said before, time is short, and life is precious.

Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.

The two areas that are changing... are information technology and medical technology. Those are the things that the world will be very different 20 years from now than it is today.