Words matter. These are the best Nathan Wolfe Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When there is an influenza threat, drop everything and focus on risks from influenza pandemics. When SARS spreads, focus on unknown respiratory diseases. This approach helps to quell public concern, but it’s a hugely inefficient way to deal with future risks.
If you find diseases before they’ve really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.
If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage – when they’re first entering human populations, preferably before they’ve had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they’ve had a chance to spread – we can head off pandemics altogether.
The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.
Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.
With epidemics, people have been standing on the shore, waiting for the gusher to hit the ocean. But to prevent epidemics, you have to look at the various little sources that feed into the river.
We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there – which is the category that HIV falls into – and we’re very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans.
Don’t assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter, in whatever field you choose to explore.
As a species, I think we have no choice but to try and forecast pandemics.
The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you’ve lost the ability to contain it.
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.
I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us.
Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we’ve reached a point where we’ve discovered most of the things. I’m going tell you right now: Please don’t despair.
There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.
About 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn’t match anything that we’ve ever seen before.
