Pathogen Control Quotes

In learning to utilize antibiotics for the control of human and animal diseases, the medical and veterinary professions have acquired powerful tools for combating infections and epidemics.

Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.

Meat and poultry is safe. It's safer than it's probably ever been.

Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.

I think it's important that, as a matter of course, the brain and spinal column were removed from this cow, and that would be the material that would cause concern in terms of human health. And therefore we're confident in the safety of the food supply.

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.

If food is processed - like canned or frozen - you can reduce the risks of pathogens.

We have seen SARS stopped dead in its tracks.

As part of our dedication to safety engineering in biology, we're trying to get better at creating physically contained test systems to develop something that eventually will be so biologically contained that we won't need physical containment anymore.

We will have to make a decision, as we go into new environments outside of earth, whether we want to drag along with us all our pathogens. We can, or we can't - it's up to us - but I consider that part of genome engineering is how we interact with the huge part of our genome which is our microbiome.