Pandemic Quotes & Sayings

The influenza pandemic of 1918 may well be the greatest scourge ever to afflict humanity, exacting a death toll greater than all the wars of the 20th Century combined. The virus that wreaked this havoc apparently developed in birds, and then jumped to people. In other words, it was avian flu. — David L. Katz

Our failure to deal with the subconscious and our tendency to blame others adds up to an inability to take responsibility for our lives. The feeling of powerlessness - and eventually hopelessness - that this engenders is an emotional cancer. If the Center for Disease Control dealt with emotional plagues, this stressful state of mind would be judged a pandemic. But this delusional state of mind is shared by nearly everyone, so it is regarded as normal. — Jim Nourse

Grave security concerns can arise as a result of demographic trends, chronic poverty, economic inequality, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases, organized crime, repressive governance and other developments no state can control alone. Arms can't address such concerns. — Ban Ki-moon

Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion ... Nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command. — Laurie Garrett

Young people were once considered relatively safe from HIV/AIDS. Today, their lives and futures are at risk throughout the world because of this disease. I believe it is young people throughout the world who offer us the greatest hope for defeating this deadly pandemic. — Liam Neeson

As men, we all have something to give. We all have the power to do our own part to stop the global pandemic of violence against women and girls. It is holding us all back. — Richard Branson

If a severe pandemic materializes, all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us. — Irwin Redlener

What if evangelical mega churches became known around the world for things like providing water access for entire countries or fighting to end the AIDS pandemic? Imagine what integrity that would give to the good news we preach, especially the gospel that Jesus declares is good news to the poor. — Shane Claiborne

It takes a variety of strategies and initiatives to address this pandemic. It's about life and death and the survival of humanity. — Barbara Lee

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there. — William Gibson

One is that if women's sexuality in Africa wasn't under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren't subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn't have a pandemic. — Stephen Lewis

Pelvic organ prolapse is not an American women's health concern, it is a global women's health pandemic. — Sherrie J. Palm

Shit, oh dear! Leave it to the government to turn a pandemic into an epic horror movie. The — P. Mark DeBryan

I'm not studying the heroes who lead navies - and armies - and win wars. I'm studying ordinary people who you wouldn't expect to be heroic, but who, when there's a crisis, show extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Like Jenna Geidel, who gave her life vaccinating people during the Pandemic. And the fishermen and retired boat owners and weekend sailors who rescued the British Army from Dunkirk. And Wells Crowther, the twenty-four-year-old equities trader who worked in the World Trade Center. When it was hit by terrorists, he could have gotten out, but instead he went back and saved ten people, and died. I'm going to observe six different sets of heroes in six different situations to try to determine what qualities they have in common. — Connie Willis

Ascribing personal responsibility to the obese individual is not a rational argument for an eminently practical reason: it fails to advance any efforts to change it. The obesity pandemic is due to our altered biochemistry, which is a result of our altered environment. — Robert H. Lustig

It could be said that the AIDS pandemic is a classic own-goal scored by the human race against itself. — Anne, Queen Of Great Britain

I'm especially interested in helping to give visibility to the pandemic of violence against women — Nicole Kidman

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected. — Anthony Fauci

There's so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it. — Annie Lennox

After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic. — Margaret Chan

If we do the kind of common-sense public health measures we know work, we ought to be able to stop it from being a global pandemic,. — Julie Gerberding

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all. — Rebecca Solnit

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster. — Bill Gates

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7. — Jennifer Gardy

Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent. — Alan Huffman

There is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic. — Billy Corgan

Chucky become a pandemic part of pop culture, definitely. — David Kirschner

For a pandemic of moderate severity, this is one of our greatest challenges: helping people to understand when they do not need to worry, and when they do need to seek urgent care. — Margaret Chan

From the beginning, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has presented very difficult challenges. — Bernie Sanders

Masterpieces of art possess immense potential to advance a worldview that could help assuage the societal terrors posed by globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism. — Martin Filler

You can't put a price tag on preparation for a pandemic. — Richard E. Besser

I had been an activist on the issue of HIV, primarily in the African American and Latino communities here in the U.S. for many years. It was horrifying to me how the pandemic was raging right here in this country but no one was talking about it. — Gloria Reuben

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy. Other — Peter Singer

Based on assessment of all available information and following several expert consultations, I have decided to raise the current level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to phase 5. — Margaret Chan

For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour. — Margaret Chan

That the AIDS pandemic is threatening sustainable development in Africa only reinforces the reality that health is at the center of sustainable development. — Gro Harlem Brundtland

In fact, the early demographer Thomas Malthus believes that the only way the human population would ever check itself was by running headlong into a disaster, like a pandemic or famine. Sometimes we get so frustrated with the slowness of human political processes that we wish a giant flaming rock would solve the problem for us. — Annalee Newitz

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

All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans. Countries should remain on high alert for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia. — Margaret Chan

Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities. — Frances Moore Lappe

If we can provide even a few months of early warning for just one pandemic, the benefits will outweigh all the time and energy we're devoting. Imagine preventing health crises, not just responding to them. — Nathan Wolfe

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself. — Anthony Fauci

Unless there is recognition that women are most vulnerable ... and you do something about social and cultural equality for women, you're never going to defeat this pandemic. — Stephen Lewis

Thank you, Sick Husband, because what I mistakenly thought was just your cold with a minor fever is apparently something closer to onset Black Plague with a side of liver disease. According to your indications, you're presenting pandemic symptoms from Europe, circa 1300 AD. We should alert the CDC! I mean, sure, I pulled off carpool, dinner, homework tutoring, and four kids' practices last week when I had strep and the flu, but you just stay in bed with your scratchy throat. We don't want to infect the children. — Jen Hatmaker

The real zombie-apocalypse is the pandemic of drama and mediocrity. — Bryant McGill

The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film. — Annalee Newitz

When we can get the incidence of HIV down enough to turn the trajectory of the pandemic, it will assume a momentum of its own in diminishing HIV. — Anthony Fauci

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet. — Laurie Garrett

What is the luck of the draw that me - me - who finally writes a book, it comes out in the - in the - in the time, in the center of the first pandemic, H1N1? And I'm going out on signings, and I'm going out to the public. This is the one time when I need to be hermetically sealed. — Howie Mandel

R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. — David Quammen

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease. — Stephen Lewis

The world's socioeconomic landscape has been drastically altered in the last three decades. The list of changes - indeed, of achievements - is as long as it is surprising: 84 percent of the world's population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. University education is up, and even average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down - by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries most hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: since 2000, cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population. — Moises Naim

We cannot proclaim this century the African Century and then ignore the AIDS pandemic, as some political leaders are apt to do. To claim this century the African Century is to declare war on AIDS. — Nelson Mandela

Should we add the 40 to 50 million victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic to the 15 million who were killed in World War I, because the flu virus would not have evolved its virulence if the war hadn't packed so many troops into trenches? — Steven Pinker

That makes climate change a bigger public health problem than AIDS, than malaria, than pandemic flu. — Lois Capps

The division into hundreds of countries whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease and who knows what else, and flourish beyond the twenty-first century. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence. — Brian Cox

I liken kissing baby cheeks to kissing stripper boobies. They're both irresistible, but you're bound to catch something. Scientists say there's at least an 18% chance that the world's next deadly viral pandemic is brewing in the saliva stew of a chubby baby's cheeks, or a stripper's boobies, at this very moment. — J. Matthew Nespoli

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world. — Anthony Fauci

Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague, — Margaret Atwood

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience. — Neel Burton

There is no governing structure for a pandemic, and little more than vague political pressure to ensure limited access to life-sparing tools and medicines for more than half the world population. — Laurie Garrett

Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope. — Annalee Newitz

Africa needs more funding to continue to fight all of those diseases. We are losing more than 1.3 million young children under the age of five every year because of malaria. We've already lost 25 million people to the pandemic of HIV-AIDS. More people are dying now from typhoid fever. Diabetes is on the rise. — Dikembe Mutombo

Explosive Pandemic-type zombies mostly spread the contagion through wounding or biting humans, and in that way, the increase their numbers. Because they multiply so quickly and explosively, they can destroy all human civilization in a very short time. For this reason, will refer to them as Explosive Pandemic-type zombies.

The person responsible for Explosive Pandemic-type zombies is none other than George A Romero, who created them in 1968 Night of the Living Dead. — Sakazaki Freddie

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic. — Barack Obama

Seasonal flu is now a pandemic that lasts for years and years because you've got so many people that it's jumping back between northern and southern hemispheres and moving itself around the world. By the time it gets back to where it started, it's changed sufficiently so that people are no longer immune. — Nathan Wolfe

No war on the face of the Earth is more destructive than the AIDS pandemic. — Colin Powell