Disease Eradication Quotes

I would love to be remembered for ridding the world of disease, but my knowledge of science comes from episodes of 'Nova' and shows on the Discovery Channel. I don't think a superficial understanding of shark behavior and black holes can help cure diseases.

There are three stages of truth. First is that it can't be true, and that's what they said. “You couldn't immunize against polio with a killed-virus vaccine.” Second phase: they say, "Well, if it's true, it's not very important. And the third stage is, 'Well, we've known it all along.

Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people?

For all these infectious diseases, the goal is to eventually get rid of them. And to do that we need to invent new tools, but nobody was doing that because there was no money to buy on behalf of the poorest, even the existing tools.

Saying Good-bye to the God of Disease (1) Mauve waters and green mountains are nothing when the great ancient doctor Hua To could not defeat a tiny worm. A thousand villages collapsed, were choked with weeds, men were lost arrows. Ghosts sang in the doorway of a few desolate houses. Yet now in a day we leap around the earth or explore a thousand Milky Ways. And if the cowherd who lives on a star asks about the god of plagues, tell him, happy or sad, the god is gone, washed away in the waters. July 1, 1958

We have the means of removing starvation and disease. We have almost unlimited power in sight, that can make the waste lands bloom. We have the possibility of banishing disease.... We ... can learn the truth and ... tell it to one another throughout a healthy world that is secure against the ravages of nature. It is the setting for a world of peace and unity. One thing is lacking. Good will and understanding.

We could conquer cancer if we really wanted to.

We have completely eradicated smallpox; we have almost eradicated polio. That's the miracle of vaccines, which is even greater than that of antibiotics.

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.

When in organism there are cancer cells, they have to be removed, not helped because they're "so young" and "so creative".

I don't want to die until I see cancer cured.

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it?

My life, like most people's, has been negatively affected by cancer, and the thought of my young children living in an age where this is no longer humanity's No. 1 health fear was simply overpowering.

As a health scientist at Columbia University, Les Roberts, pointed out, sooner or later people are going to be looking at a child in a wheelchair suffering from polio and will say 'the Americans did that to him'. So they continue policies which have similar effects i.e. organising the Taliban. This will come back to them too.

I'll get to see many disease eradications. and we're seeing a lot of progress.

We are a fighting nation, continually struggling to overcome diseases from within... and to face up to foreign intervention from without.

Many sections of our country and many groups of our citizens suffer from diseases the eradication of which are mere matters of administration and moderate expenditure. Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

I really do think cancer will largely be a solved problem. I think most of the infectious diseases like malaria - our foundation is very involved - once we're finishing polio eradication, then starting up this malaria eradication, and getting that done as fast as we can.

It is now conceivable that our children's children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars.

I can cure AIDS, and I will.

[AIDS ] is not a short-term emergency but it is something that, just like smallpox was many decades ago, we should aim for complete eradication.

Between 2000 and 2010, malaria mortality rates fell by 26 percent around the world. According to the latest World Health Organization estimates, there were about 219 million cases of malaria in 2010 and an estimated 660,000 deaths.

So not only are we saving lives now, we're creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down.

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

[we have]taming of an ancient disease [malaria] that over the centuries has killed untold millions of people.