Quotes from Laurie Garrett

Most Americans think that public health is services for poor people, and since most Americans hate poor people and want all poor people's services destroyed, they hate public health.

At no time in history have we succeeded in making, in a timely fashion, a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people.

'Contagion' should serve as a wake-up call not only about the germs, but perhaps more importantly about the frailty of governance, nationally and worldwide.

What public health really is is a trust. That's why I used the term 'Betrayal of Trust' as the title of my book. It's a trust between the government and the people.

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.

Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness.

Public health is not an ideology, religion, or political perspective—indeed, history demonstrates that whenever such forces interfere with or influence public health activities a general worsening of the populace's well-being usually followed.

The skills needed to describe and recognize perturbations in the Homo sapiens microecology are disappearing with the passing of the generations, leaving humanity, lulled into a complacency born of proud discoveries and medical triumphs, unprepared for the coming plague. 1 Machupo BOLIVIAN HEMORRHAGIC FEVER Any attempt to shape the world and modify human personality in order to create a self-chosen pattern of life involves many unknown consequences.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

In 1980 the Latin American nations collectively were receiving from their external creditors—major banks, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank—about $11 billion more than they were losing in capital transfers back to wealthy-nation interests. But by 1985 these nations would be losing $35 billion more a year in capital transfers to North America and Europe than they received in loans and investments.41

To comprehend the interactions between Homo sapiens and the vast and diverse microbial world, perspectives must be forged that meld such disparate fields as medicine, environmentalism, public health, basic ecology, primate biology, human behavior, economic development, cultural anthropology, human rights law, entomology, parasitology, virology, bacteriology, evolutionary biology, and epidemiology.

Nature isn't benign," Lederberg said at the meeting's opening. "The bottom lines: the units of natural selection—DNA, sometimes RNA elements—are by no means neatly packaged in discrete organisms. They all share the entire biosphere. The survival of the human species is not a preordained evolutionary program. Abundant sources of genetic variation exist for viruses to learn new tricks, not necessarily confined to what happens routinely, or even frequently.

Humanity's ancient enemies are, after all, microbes. They didn't go away just because science invented drugs, antibiotics, and vaccines (with the notable exception of smallpox). They didn't disappear from the

This book sounds an alarm. The world needs—now—a global early-warning system capable of detecting and responding to new emerging infectious disease threats to health. There is no clearer warning than AIDS. Laurie Garrett has spelled it out clearly for us. Now we ignore it at our peril.

The Institute of Medicine report hit the public health community like buckets of ice water, waking it up but leaving it shivering in its impoverished, unheated facilities, unable to muster the energy to tackle the problem.

The mutability of bacteria, coupled with their ability to pass around and share genetic trumps in a microscopic game of cards, seemed to increasingly leave Homo sapiens holding losing hands.

Only mosquito can save Nigeria. Only mosquito can save South Africa. Only mosquito can save Zimbabwe Only mosquito can save Namibia. Only mosquito can save Africa. Only malaria can save Africa. Only yellow fever can save Africa.

If we hadn't broken every single WHO rule many times over, we would never have defeated samllpox. Never. - Arita, leader of smallpox eradication effort

We'll never escape the limits of the ecosystem. We are caught in the food chain, whether we like it or not, eating and being eaten.

diseases which spring from insects and animals to humans, through manmade disruptions in local habitats.

A new global iatrogenic form of malaria was emerging—"iatrogenic" meaning created as a result of medical treatment. In its well-meaning zeal to treat the world's malaria scourge, humanity had created a new epidemic.

planet when Americans and Europeans cleaned up their towns and cities in the postindustrial era. And they certainly won't become extinct simply because human beings choose to ignore their existence.

Fear, without potential mitigating

solutions, can be very volatile.