Quotes from Tom Frieden

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

From all the available evidence, the body has an excellent immune response to Zika. Therefore, once you get it once, you will never get it again.

Controlling mosquitos is tough. It's not quick; it's not easy. It requires work day in and day out to track where mosquitos are and to apply safely the appropriate mosquito control methods.

Over and over, nature shows that it's a really tough adversary. That's why it's important that we invest in laboratories, disease detectives, research, mosquito control, the public health system around the world to find, stop, track, prevent health threats.

We have learned a lot about how to treat Ebola, how to ensure that the people caring for people with Ebola do so minimizing their risk of infection.

People traveling to malaria-prone areas can protect themselves by taking steps such as taking antimalarial drugs, using insect repellent, sleeping under insecticide-treated bed-nets, and wearing protective clothing.

Every health threat has a different nature and characteristic and appropriate response. Zika is a particular risk to pregnant women who reside in or thinking of traveling to places where Zika is spreading.

I've treated so many adults who are desperate - desperate - to get off tobacco. They all started as kids. I see the industry getting another generation of our kids addicted.

We know how to stop Ebola: by isolating and treating patients, tracing and monitoring their contacts, and breaking the chains of transmission.

Women should use pain medication only as directed and talk with their doctor about all drugs they're taking, including over-the-counter medications. Store prescription drugs in a secure place and properly dispose of them as soon as treatment is over. And never share prescription drugs with anyone else.

Health is correlated with quality of life. If you get regular physical activity, have social connections, control your cholesterol, keep your blood pressure at a normal level, don't smoke - these things can make an enormous difference not only in how long you live, but how much you enjoy your life in those years.

Tobacco marketing often reaches children and youth and entices them to start using tobacco while they are still at an impressionable age. Nearly four out of five high school cigarette smokers will become adult smokers, even if they intend to quit in a few years. By the time they want to quit, they're hooked.

We have to keep up our guard. We won't get the risk of Ebola to zero in the U.S. until we stop it in West Africa. And Ebola is hard to fight. It requires intensity. It requires speed and flexibility.

The importance in what we're seeing in countries around the world is a poorly regulated and poorly functioning private sector using irrational and ineffective medications that result in the emergence of drug-resistance tuberculosis. What we've done is begun a program to rapidly improve infection control in places that are treating TB patients.

Stopping TB requires a government program that functions every day of the year, and that's hard in certain parts of the world. And partly it's because of who tuberculosis affects: It tends to affect the poor and disenfranchised most.

The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States has caused some to call on the United States to ban travel for anyone from the countries in West Africa facing the worst of the Ebola epidemic. That response is understandable. It's only human to want to protect ourselves and our families.

Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it's really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.

New, unfamiliar, and mysterious threats to our health are scary. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - where we identify, on average, one new health threat each year - we work around the clock with an approach that prioritizes finding out what we need to know as fast as we can to protect Americans.

Zika is spread by mosquitos. They are tough to control. It will bite four or five people at one blood meal. They can breed in the amount of water it takes to fill up a bottle cap or, theoretically, even a drop of water. You have to get rid of maybe 90% of them or more before you protect people.

The way Zika spreads is primarily through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in places that don't have screens and air-conditioning.

Reducing MRSA infections is critical because these bacteria are difficult to treat and are common in healthcare settings, especially among ICU (intensive care unit) patients.

It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.

I think we didn't recognize how hard it would be to care for someone with Ebola who was desperately ill in the U.S., and how much hands-on nursing care there would be, and we didn't expect two nurses to get infected.

It's understandable that when something new comes out that's unfamiliar, scary, and has severe outcomes, it gets a lot of media attention. In fact, the Zika outbreak is unprecedented. We've never before identified a mosquito-borne infection that can cause fetal malformations.