Jonas Salk Quotes

I loved clinical practice, but in public health, you can impact more than one person at a time. The whole society is your patient.

Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time

One cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the community, from the health of the world.

Vaccination and other essential preventive services must be delivered close within communities.

A prevention-based society is one in which every institution, whether they're a hospital or a clinic, or a school, an employer or a faith-based organization, recognizes and embraces the role that it can play in improving health.

Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.

What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system.

Modern 'public health' initiatives have moved well beyond what could reasonably be classified as public goods. Today, government undertakes all sorts of policies in the name of public health that are aimed at regulating personal behavior.

When I jump into something, I really do it to the fullest extent that my time and energy will allow me. I'm from Texas, and to see so many people that are obese and with disorders that are preventable. They haven't been shown or told. I'm really passionate about making sure my fellow countrymen are healthy. It's a shame.

In the future, it's going to become more and more impossible for the economy to support how expensive medical care is and the number of sick people we have. Why don't we just get our population healthier so we don't need medical care?

I think we should put the same weight now on the co-factors as we have on HIV.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.

I definitely want to study global health. Right now I'm working on all the prerequisite core curriculum that Columbia has. So getting all of that out of the way. And I definitely want to pursue something along the lines of public health.

I've always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot - a lot of little things that achieve results. That's a classic public health approach.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

There is simply not enough money available to support a system in which the lion's share of expenditures is devoted to acute care, with virtually nothing being spent on preventive medicine, i.e. health care.

I begin with the premise that behavior is an incredibly important element in medicine. People's habits, their willingness to quit smoking, their willingness to take steps to avoid transmission of HIV, are all behavioral questions.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

I want us to be judged by the impact we have on the health of the people of Africa and the health of women. Improvements in the health of the people of Africa and the health of women are key indicators of the performance of WHO. This is a health organization for the whole world... But we must focus our attention on the people in greatest need.

As population susceptibilities are better understood, we will be in a better position than we are in today to make informed decisions about risk management.

[Public Health] means the saving and lengthening of lives of thousands of citizens, the extension of the vigorous working period well into old age, and the prevention of inefficiency, misery, and suffering. These advances can be made by organized social effort. Public health is purchasable.

I think the problem with the country is that we operate on a sickness model, not a wellness model... Basically, we treat people who become ill. What we don't do is do a very good job in keeping them healthy in the first place...

As director of the CDC, one of the best parts of my job is announcing good news.

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.