Public Health Infrastructure 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.

Nigeria and Pakistan are two countries that have had a lot of trouble with polio. And part of the reason is that there's a lot of political unrest, and people really distrust what the government is doing. That has an effect on people's health, and it has an effect on the health of children.

As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.

We need strong public health institutions to respond to any challenge. We need to deal with critical infrastructure. The reality is that very little money has flowed to communities to help our first responders; to help our hospitals; to help the public health infrastructure.

Over and over, nature shows that it's a really tough adversary. That's why it's important that we invest in laboratories, disease detectives, research, mosquito control, the public health system around the world to find, stop, track, prevent health threats.

There is a cost for investing in pandemic preparedness, but a much bigger cost for not investing in it.

This change to a higher phase of alert is a signal to governments, to ministries of health and other ministries, to the pharmaceutical industry and the business community that certain actions now should be undertaken with increased urgency and at an accelerated pace.

Hospitals are only an intermediate stage of civilization

There is an urgent need for the Central government to take the lead in ensuring health and nutrition service delivery.

I think the world should unite and focus on strong health systems to prepare the whole world to prevent epidemics - or if there is an outbreak, to manage it quickly - because viruses don't respect borders, and they don't need visas.

Strong leadership is essential in the face of health crises. Complex public health emergencies demand a collective response with high-level political and diplomatic engagement at both the national and global levels.

Health system development is a key to effective detection, response, and control of any outbreak.

Using predictive models from engineering and public health, designers will plan safer, healthier cities that could allow us to survive natural disasters, pandemics, and even a radiation calamity that drives us underground.

A severe disease that transmits easily will leave very little international surge capacity as most countries will need their own staff and resources to combat the outbreak in their territories.

I am absolutely convinced there should be financial and political incentives for states to declare. You shouldn't be the pariah of the world if you say you have Ebola, but in reality this is what happens.

The infrastructure for linking environmental health and public health is not working as well as it should.

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.