Public Health Risk Quotes

Rome is the most dreadful cesspit … the great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth.

You can't eat tomatoes because they're tainted with deadly salmonella. First there was tainted lettuce. Now, tainted tomatoes. Who would have thought that the healthiest part of a B.L.T. would be the bacon?

It is inconceivable that releasing an illegal immigrant that could cause a tuberculosis pandemic here in the U.S. would ever be considered as a possible option.

The spread of HIV through contaminated blood was a tragic illustration of the risk that blood products could harbor undetectable and latent infection that's only revealed once it's widely distributed.

In the 1950s and '60s, America's natural resources were in bad shape. Communities were so polluted that clouds of smog lingered over cities like Los Angeles. Rivers and lakes were filled with chemicals. In my hometown of Boston, the harbor was among the nation's most polluted waterways.

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.

One day at Princeton, I noticed there were dead birds on the pavement between the campus buildings, where very large trees were. It turns out it was DDT. At the time, in the early '50s, no one thought DDT was dangerous to anybody but insects. I went down to the Daily Princetonian, the college paper, and tried to persuade them to do a story. They said, "Naw, there's nothing wrong." But that taught me a very important lesson. One, that newspaper people can get very jaded. Second, that you might know something, like an expert chemistry professor, you are not going to apply what you know.

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease.

More people living in less space can put greater strain on already limited sanitation resources, and this can create a fertile breeding ground for waterborne infectious disease and the insects spreading them.

The Environmental Protection Agency rarely follows up prosecuting coal companies and their fellow polluters, even when the evidence is clear-cut that they are dumping and poisoning entire towns near their projects, and the state regulators are even worse.

Somehow the government has convinced the American people that using tear gas is perfectly harmless, despite stark evidence to the contrary.

MRSA, which is a kind of super bug mutant, is killing 10,000 people a year in Britain.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has shown us what can happen when we ignore the warning signs of lead poisoning and corroding pipes.

Can you imagine the headlines if I gave someone food poisoning? They'd hang me off Tower Bridge by my ballbag!

I don't like litter and blight.

President Bush's mercury rule is a gift to the big energy companies that helped put him in office.

What do we know about the diseases carried by illegal aliens? Not much, thanks to government secrecy, but we know enough to be worried.

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.

Yes, it is worse than thrown away, because every fair minded man must admit that the expenditure of this sum of money in the county for intoxicating liquor creates lawlessness, makes criminals, wrecks homes and brings trouble to innocent women and children.

Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning.

Despite the debunking, you have a small group in the last five years that hasn't wanted to vaccinate their children, for instance, for measles. Then, all of sudden, we got an outbreak of measles and kids were starting to die from measles.

While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

The procedure has a strange Alice-in-Wonderland quality. The reservoir was created as a public water supply, yet the community, probably unconsulted about the sportsmen's project, is forced either to drink water containing poisonous residues or to pay our tax money for treatment of the water to remove the poisons - treatments that are by no means foolproof.