Quotes & Sayings About Disease Prevention

Malaria-hosting mosquitoes will not wait politely during their most active evening feeding hours for people to go to bed under mosquito nets. — T.K. Naliaka

The work on [polio] prevention was long delayed by ... misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys — Albert Sabin

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

An important finding is that by determining the genome sequences of an entire family, one can identify many DNA sequencing errors and thus greatly increase the accuracy of the data. This will ultimately help us understand the role of genetic variations in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease. — Leroy Hood

According to the comprehensive Global Burden of Disease project, the leading risk factors for ill health and premature death are linked to lifestyle, what we eat and drink and how much we exercise. Disease prevention does not occur in the hospital. We need the whole of society to be involved. — Jonas Gahr Store

Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.1 — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

For disease prevention, berries of all colors have "emerged as champions," according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.39 The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.40 But it wasn't known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells. — Michael Greger

He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, but he that prevents it is the safest physician. — Thomas Fuller

Medication, surgery, and medical tests are all focused on disease, not on health. Prevention is the act of moving away from the disease. Proactivity in health is seeking a high level of wellness and acting in a way that will create that reality in your life. — Rand Olson

For the mass prevention of disease, mass education is a key weapon. — T.R. Reid

National Osteoporosis Awareness and Prevention Month is celebrated each May, and becomes a chance for our Nation to become more familiar with the effects of this disease, and about the preventable steps that we can take to deal with it. — Lois Capps

To paraphrase Lucretius, there's nothing more useful than to watch a man or woman in times of contagious deadly disease peril combined with his or her assumptions of financial adversity to discern what kind of man or woman they really are. — T.K. Naliaka

Shovels aren't very glamorous, but they've been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years. — T.K. Naliaka

As many citizens can attest, the U.S. is a great place to get sick, but a terrible place to stay well. This requires a shift in the way both doctors and patients approach health maintenance and disease prevention. — Rob Wittman

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. — Harvey V. Fineberg

When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice. — T.K. Naliaka

Indeed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that 65 million people in the United States now have a sexually transmitted virus, and they will suffer from it for the rest of their lives. — James C. Dobson

It is not possible to live in a malaria endemic zone without either being sickened by it oneself or without knowing someone who has had it or been hospitalized with it or without personally knowing at least one man, woman or child who has died from it or without knowing at least one woman who has lost her unborn baby from it. — T.K. Naliaka

Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur. — Michael J. Fox

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his (sic)patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease — Thomas Jefferson

Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless. — Thomas A. Edison

China and other members should join efforts to combat serious infectious disease, such as bird flu. To enhance the cooperation on the prevention of bird flu is an important target of the organization, which includes Russia, China and four Central Asian states. — Wen Jiabao

Prevention of disease must become the goal of every physician. — Henry E. Sigerist

Separation from the community creates isolation. Isolation is the source of most physical, emotional and spiritual disease. — Sharon Weil

Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented toward healing rather than disease, where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention above treatment. In such a world, doctors and patients would be partners working toward the same ends. — Andrew Weil

When we assess someone's life or health on the basis of surface-level observations or passing comments, it presents us with a very flawed version of reality. — Evita Ochel

We recognized in 1996 that, with progress in the field of genetics accelerating at a breathtaking pace, we need to ensure that advances in treatment and prevention of disease do not constitute a new basis for discrimination. — Olympia Snowe

As a practicing neurologist, I place central importance in applying current science to the notion of disease prevention. — David Perlmutter

Polyunsaturated fats include safflower oil, corn oil, soybean oil and canola oil, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. — Anonymous

Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings - anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness - is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit. — Daniel Goleman

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2010. Establishing a Holistic Framework to Reduce Inequities in HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STDs, and Tuberculosis in the United States. — Leiyu Shi

We are the custodians of our bodies. We must take action to employ healthy lifestyle habits to prevent, reduce, and/or manage disease and illness. — Bridgette L. Collins

In regard to the aetiology of infectious diseases we must abandon the notions conceived in time of Koch, Ehrlich and Pasteur on the 'pathogenic' nature of the microorganisms of external and internal media. In the full sense of the word it is not the bacteria themselves that are pathogenic, but those physiological correlations which exist in the given organism at a particular moment and which are organically connected with the disturbances in its regulative systems and nervous mechanisms. There are no special 'pathogenic' microbes in nature; there are, however, no end of factors that promote susceptibility in a normally resistant subject, and vice versa. — Arshavir Ter Hovannessian

College campuses are a focus of prevention efforts for meningococcal disease because of the increased incidence of the disease during adolescence and young adulthood, as well as transmission from crowded living conditions and social behaviors common among college students. — Erik Paulsen

I think integrative medicine, something I've pioneered, is the way of the future. Its great promise is that it can reduce healthcare costs by shifting the whole focus of healthcare away from disease management to health promotion and prevention. They can do that two ways: first, by focusing attention on lifestyle medicine, which is very deficient. And second, by bringing into the mainstream treatments that are lower cost because they are not dependent on expensive technology. — Andrew Weil

Nowhere is it more true that "prevention is better than cure," than in the case of Parasitic Diseases. — Rudolf Leuckart

Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red. — Molly Caldwell Crosby

Being gay is not a terrible, tragic disease that requires prevention or treatment chosen for you by your parents. — Alice Dreger

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established highly specific criteria for the diagnosis of Lyme disease: an acknowledged tick bite, the appearance of a bull's-eye rash, and, for those who don't live in a region where Lyme is common, laboratory evidence of infection. — Michael Specter

One of the more exciting benefits of good nutrition is the prevention of diseases that are thought to be due to genetic predisposition. We now know that we can largely avoid these "genetic" diseases even though we may harbor the gene (or genes) that is (are) responsible for the disease. — T. Colin Campbell

Diseases can rarely be eliminated through early diagnosis or good treatment, but prevention can eliminate disease. — Denis Parsons Burkitt