healthcare progress Quotes

Child mortality since 2000 is down by 2.65 million a year. That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day. ... It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news.

While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.

It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars.

With world health, every life you save is a wonderful thing, so it's not this question of whether you solve it or you don't. The chance of completely solving the problems has long odds. But really, the thing is that you get to save the first child, the second child, the third child. You can just feel good about that.

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.

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.

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization

When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.

Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.

During my tenure as Minister of Health of Ethiopia from 2005 to 2012, we achieved tremendous progress in tackling the many infectious diseases prevalent in resource-poor countries such as my own.

Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.

Research must be central to healthcare if healthcare is to improve.

Our work in global health is about things like cutting childhood deaths, and every year we continue to make progress there.

It seems paradoxical that, as medical scientists make huge advances in discovering the mechanisms of common diseases, fewer and fewer innovative drugs are reaching the market.

Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

A few countries like Sri Lanka and Honduras have led the way in slashing maternal mortality.

The period of time between the uncovering of some fundamental scientific finding that underpinned a medical advance, and the realization of the corresponding advance in the form of a new drug or medical technique that improves the health of patients, is being continually hastened.

We have grown accustomed to the wonders of clean water, indoor plumbing, laser surgery, genetic engineering, artificial joints, replacement body parts, and the much longer lives that accompany them. Yet we should remember that the vast majority of humans ever born died before the age of 10 from an infectious disease.

Whenever you have a few setbacks, the idea that half as many children are dying now as back in 1990 and so... it was over 12 million a year, now it's less than 6 million a year. We have a clear path to get that under 3 million a year and we know what to do. And this generation of young Africans is a very large group.

We are unique among advanced countries that we don't have universal health care. My hope was that I was able to get a hundred percent of people health care while I was president. We didn't quite achieve that, but we were able to get 20 million people health care who didn't have it before. And obviously some of the progress we made is now imperiled because there's still a significant debate taking place in the United States. For those 20 million people, their lives have been better.

We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.