Words matter. These are the best Seth Berkley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly… the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic.
When it comes to providing aid, developing innovations, and making bold steps that change the course of history, the United States is usually on the front lines.
The GAVI Alliance has achieved many things in its first dozen years, but none more important than helping save more than 5.5 million lives and prevent untold illness and suffering.
Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you’re pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that’s really how vaccines work.
When AIDS first appeared, people didn’t know what it was. You’ll remember that it affected mostly young gay men – it was actually called GRID for a short period of time: Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome – and people thought it actually might be recreational drugs or other types of toxins.
Science is one of the comparative advantages of our knowledge-based economy, and focusing on our prowess in providing better tools to address diseases of poverty is one of the best forms of foreign aid.
Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power.
Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.
The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.
Healthy children are more likely to attend school and are better able to learn. Healthy workers are more productive. More productive economies mean greater stability in developing countries and improved security in the West.
With infectious disease, without vaccines, there’s no safety in numbers.
The return on investment in global health is tremendous, and the biggest bang for the buck comes from vaccines. Vaccines are among the most successful and cost-effective health investments in history.
Land degradation, rising sea levels, famine, and conflict will continue to drive people from their homes and towards cities, with megacities like Mexico City and Lagos becoming increasingly common in some of the poorest parts of the world.
I was a serial monogamist.
You can’t stop wars to build tertiary teaching hospitals, but you can say, ‘Let’s stop for a couple of days to immunise the kids.’ It has been done.
Vaccines are extremely cost-effective, giving kids a healthy start in life and supporting the economic and educational foundations of entire communities. They directly lead to a healthy workforce, which is so critical to long-term development and prosperity in all countries.
As megacities like Mexico City and Lagos become increasingly common, we could see a rise of the urban epidemic and a new era of infectious disease threatening global health security.
I love science, and I believe in it. I have a faith that science can solve problems and make the world a better place.
As cities get bigger, our best defence will be to prevent outbreaks in the first place by building better public health systems, improving childhood immunisation through better routine immunisation and pre-emptive vaccination campaigns.
As demonstrated by the emergence of the Mexican swine flu in the U.S., infectious diseases have little respect for borders; helping developing countries detect and deal with their diseases is the surest way for us to protect ourselves from new and potentially devastating epidemics.
I wish we could have state-of-the-art hospitals in every corner of the earth… but realistically, it’s going to be a while before that can happen. But we can immunise every kid on earth, and we can prevent these diseases. It’s only a matter of political will, a little bit of money and some systems to do it.
We’ve actually eliminated Type II polio in the world, at least as far as we can tell.
More people living in less space can put greater strain on already limited sanitation resources, and this can create a fertile breeding ground for waterborne infectious disease and the insects spreading them.
Yellow fever outbreaks are not uncommon. But, as with other infectious diseases, when they occur in urban areas, they can play out very differently – not least in terms of the speed and scale at which they can spread.
GAVI works collaboratively with the private sector – from investment banks to vaccine suppliers to corporations to members of the Forbes 400 – to find new and better ways to raise and apply resources and broaden the base of participants in global health.
