Outbreak Prevention Quotes

In 2009, when I was Health Minister, we re-engineered our business processes to examine the weaknesses and opportunities in our health system. Following that exercise, we established a public health emergency management system from national to district level to prevent and provide rapid response to outbreaks.

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

When [disease] can't be stopped, that's where we become lost.

We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.

To be able to detect the outbreak of avian flu anywhere in the world is going to require a partnership of several countries that will share information and samples, but it is important to remember a threat anywhere is a threat everywhere.

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

It turns out that cholera is new to Haiti. It was inadvertently introduced by a group of U.N. peacekeepers stationed in central Haiti who had come from South Asia where it is endemic.

There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.

Anything you say before a pandemic occurs sounds alarmist; anything you say after it occurs is inadequate.

Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.

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 have to keep up our guard. We won't get the risk of Ebola to zero in the U.S. until we stop it in West Africa. And Ebola is hard to fight. It requires intensity. It requires speed and flexibility.

By giving the FDA adequate resources and authority to both prevent outbreaks and intervene once they appear, we can support the administration's efforts to reassure the parents of America that the food they feed their children is the product of the safest system in the world.