Pandemic Risk Quotes

Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us.

A respiratory pathogen may pose an asymmetric risk to America, given our culture, economy and federalist system.

You can't take a knife on a plane anymore, but you can get on carrying a virus.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

Global pandemics---whether naturally occurring or intentionally spread---pose a greater threat than most man-made weapons of mass destruction.

As megacities like Mexico City and Lagos become increasingly common, we could see a rise of the urban epidemic and a new era of infectious disease threatening global health security.

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

The fact that there was no catastrophic pandemic in recent history does not mean there won't be another one. And we are certainly not prepared for the next pandemic.

The possible impact of the virus [Zika] an extraordinary event and a public health threat to other parts of the world.

Humankind's craving to control nature and exploit all its resources for profit can be wiped out in a stroke by an organism we cannot even see with the naked eye.

We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system.

Take pandemics. There could easily be a severe pandemic. A lot of that comes from something we don't pay much attention to: Eating meat. The meat production industry, the industrial production of meat, uses an immense amount of antibiotics.We're now running out of antibiotics that deal with the threat of rapidly mutating bacteria. A lot of that just comes from the meat production industry. Well, do we worry about it? Well, we ought to be.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

Everyone needs to remember that Ebola was not a worst-case scenario. Preparedness for the future means preparedness for a very severe disease that spreads via the airborne route or can be transmitted during the incubation period, before an infected person shows telltale signs of illness.

The single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus.