Public Health Quotes

“Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics; laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Adult obesity and overweight statistics have increased by about 50 percent since the Dietary Goals were announced. [by the federal government, in 1977] That bears repeating: a 50 percent increase in obesity/overweight correlated with a 10 percent decrease in fat content in the diet.”
― Larry McCleary MD, Feed Your Brain, Lose Your Belly

“Amateurs are fond of advising that all practical measures should be postponed pending carrying out detailed researches upon the habits of anophelines, the parasite rate of localities, the effect of minor works, and so on. In my opinion, this is a fundamental mistake. It implies the sacrifice of life and health on a large scale while researches which may have little real value and which may be continued indefinitely are being attempted… In practical life we observe that the best practical discoveries are obtained during the execution of practical work and that long academic discussions are apt to lead to nothing but academic profit. Action and investigation together do more than either of these alone.”
― Ronald Ross, Researches on malaria

“How to spell Aedes aegypti,the world's one-stop, viral-disease-transmitting mosquito: T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Incredibly, just one mosquito species, Aedes aegypti is responsible for the spread of four known different deadly viral diseases to human beings, yet this mosquito has been allowed to infest densely-populated urban centers.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Recognizing its importance, Aedes aegypti should be studied as a long-term national, regional, and world problem rather than as a temporary local threat to the communities suffering at any given moment from yellow fever, dengue or other aegypti-borne disease. No one can foresee the extent of the future threat of Aedes aegypti to mankind as a vector of known virus diseases, and none can foretell what other virus diseases may yet affect regions where A. aegypti is permitted to remain.”
― Fred Lowe Soper, Building the Health Bridge: Selections from the Works of Fred L. Soper

“Aedes aegypti, which transmits yellow fever, is one of the feeblest species in its ability for flight and it is at once blown away and destroyed when it gets into a breeze. It therefore seldom wanders from the house in which it was bred.”
― William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama

“Havana, Cuba, in which city yellow fever had not failed to make its yearly appearance during the past one hundred and forty years... Havana was freed from yellow fever within ninety days. Dr. Walter Reed, 1902”
― Walter Reed

“Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In one respect New Orleans has set an example for all the world in the fight against yellow fever. The first impression was the complete organization of the citizens and the rational and reasonable way in which the fight has been conducted by them. With a tangible enemy in view, the army of defense could begin to fight rationally and scientifically. The... spirit in which the citizens of New Orleans sallied forth to win this fight strikes one who has been witness to the profound gloom, distress, and woe that cloud every other epidemic city. Rupert Boyce, Dean of Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases, 1905”
― Rupert Boyce

“Despite 4,000 years of proven usefulness, quarantines seem to be to modern international public health experts as garlic is to a vampire.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Can the CEO of a pharmaceutical company prioritize opioid addiction as a top concern if they are making a profit from opioids?”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“If [Hurricane] Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP [Deepwater Horizon] disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP has spent weeks failing to plug the hole in the earth that it made. Our political leaders cannot order fish species to survive, or bottlenose dolphins not to die in droves. No amount of compensation money can replace a culture that has lots its roots. And while politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water, and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

“The use of vaccine in the control of yellow fever should occupy more or less the same place that typhoid fever vaccine has in the control of typhoid fever. No sanitary authority would desire to substitute typhoid vaccine for the supply of pure water and food, so we must not accept the yellow fever vaccine as a substitute for the elimination of Aedes aegypti. The vaccine provides individual protection for the person who cannot be protected by more general measures.”
― Fred Lowe Soper

“Raising awareness versus raising alarm;
the public can't be better informed if the information isn't better.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Adding social structural analysis to medical and public health education would move toward a more realistic and balanced version of the biopsychosocial model already explicitly claimed in contemporary health-professional training. More important, this would provide future physicians and public health professionals with the lenses to recognize the societal critiques available in sicknesses and their distributions. With such an awareness of the structurally violent social context of disease, health professionals could move effectively toward acknowledging, treating, and preventing suffering.”
― Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

“Imagine a world where people were 10% happier and less reactive. Marriage, parenting, road rage, politics - all would be improved upon. Public health revolutions can happen rapidly. Most Americans didn't brush their teeth until after world war 2 after soldiers were demanded to maintain oral hygiene. Exercise didn't get popular until science proved its benefits. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“Chronic stress in infancy and early childhood has been identified as a major contributor to adult health problems. In 2009, Jack Shonkoff and colleagues published a major review in the Journal of the American Medical Association that stated that "adult disease prevention begins with reducing early toxic stress." Considering the state of American's health, this is something we should take quite seriously. A recent report from the Institute of Medicine (2013) noted the following:

"For many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high-income countries. This disadvantage has been getting worse for three decades, especially among women. Not only are their lives shorter, but Americans also have a longstanding pattern of poorer health that is strikingly consistent and pervasive over the life course."

One way we can improve the health of the next generation is to challenge the hegemony of the cry-it-out advocates. We need to stand by the others we serve as they make the decision to defy cultural norms and respond to their babies. The health of the next generation depends on it.”
― Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, Impact of Sleep Training and Cry it Out: Excerpt from The Science of Mother-Infant Sleep

“Nearly all large healthcare organizations make their top executives extremely rich, a perverse incentive to profit off the sick.”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“Doubt is crucial in science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge."

...Individual clinicians cannot single-handedly combat this kind of antiscience, a climate that has only been fostered by some political and religious leaders and by the social media. But at the very least, we can make our patients aware of the forces at play and the mind games that such merchants of doubt employ.”
― John Halamka, The Transformative Power of Mobile Medicine: Leveraging Innovation, Seizing Opportunities and Overcoming Obstacles of mHealth

“Eradicating mosquitoes is a means to an end. An uninfected mosquito is harmless to humans - just a nuisance. An infected mosquito is a danger.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Medical errors—third leading cause of death in the U.S.—signifies a moral, professional, and public health dilemma.”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“Can specialty physicians prioritize preventative health, physicals, and early screenings if they are doctors for people who are sick?”
― Kat Lahr, What the U.S. Healthcare System Doesn't Want You to Know, Why, and How You Can Do Something About It

“This brings us to the saddest episode int he whole smoking-cancer controversy: the deliberate efforts of the tobacco companies to deceive the public about the health risks. If Nature is like a genie that answers a question truthfully but only exactly as it is asked, imagine how much more difficult it is for scientists to face an adversary that intends to deceive us. The cigarette wars were science’s first confrontation with organized denialism, and no one was prepared.The tobacco companies magnified any shred of scientific controversy they could. They set up their own Tobacco Industry Research Committee, a front organization that gave money to scientists to study issues related to cancer or tobacco—but somehow never got around to the central question. When they could find legitimate skeptics of the smoking-cancer connection—such as R. A.Fisher and Jacob Yerushalmy—the tobacco companies paid them consulting fees.”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“When the #COVID19Pandemic is over, the world needs to come together and create a unified vision for public health. What we consider our public health strategy lacks vision, agility and innovation and is in serious need of disruption. The societal pause is an opportunity to develop a new vision that is consistent with the requirements of a hyper-connected mobile society.”
― Tom Golway

“In the U.S., whichever party was in power wasn't interested in support for public health. Public health never competed well for resources in either the House or the Senate. Countries were like people: they didn't value health until they lost it. And then once they got it back, they returned to their old complacency.”
― Jim Shepard, Phase Six

“It is the pinnacle of arrogance to assume that whatever it is that “the experts” believe now is in fact the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Scientists have believed and public health officials have promoted many wrong things over the years, for both honorable, and not so honorable reasons. Sometimes the public health message is dead wrong.”
― Heather E. Heying

“The mosquito is the deadliest animal in the world... When it comes to killing humans, no other animal even comes close.”
― Bill Gates with Collins Hemingway

“You cannot serve needs you do not know”
― Dr. Tiffany Anderson

“An investment in the well being of families transforms the community for families!”
― Dr. Tiffany Anderson