Seth Berkley Quotes

A more effective international disease surveillance system is essential for global security both against a bioterrorist attack or a naturally occurring disease.

In today's world, it is shortsighted to think that infectious diseases cannot cross borders. By allowing developing countries access to generic drugs, we not only help improve health in those nations, we also help ourselves control these debilitating and often deadly diseases.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

The health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security and is dependent upon the fullest co-operation of individuals and States.

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.

Disease is a non-partisan problems that requires a non-partisan solution.

There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.

AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations.

This is a historic moment in global public health, demonstrating the international will to tackle a threat to health head on.

The WHO is the lead agency in health in the United Nations system, and clearly we have very important functions to play.

It’s not the mosquitoes who spread the disease [Zika]. Mosquitoes don’t travel more than 500 yards from where they are born. It’s the people. They travel.

The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.

As demonstrated by the emergence of the Mexican swine flu in the U.S., infectious diseases have little respect for borders; helping developing countries detect and deal with their diseases is the surest way for us to protect ourselves from new and potentially devastating epidemics.

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.

It's now evident that public health is part of national security.

I think disease and all the things that we treat are tied to national security in a lot of ways that we maybe don't realize or that the American people don't realize. If other countries have a chance to be stable, then that helps us. If there are ways we can prevent if there are ways we can help other countries defeat diseases, we're about to totally eradicate polio. And can you imagine? That would be so terrific.

New vaccines are being developed all the time, which could save many more lives and dramatically improve people's health. And this goes beyond the traditional burden of childhood infectious diseases.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.

Science is beginning to catch up with global health problems.

Pandemic influenza is by nature an international issue; it requires an international solution.

It will be impossible for us to eradicate HIV as long as any corner of the world is cut off from the education and services that we know helps stop the spread of this disease.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

AIDS win be our first priority, but in two years' time we don't know where AIDS research will stand, so we are also thinking of activity on other diseases.

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.