Top 88 Public Health Quotes

Our state’s public health department is responsible for overseeing a large array of healthcare needs, including natural disasters, chronic diseases, and emerging threats. And in these efforts, we want to ensure that no one in Connecticut is left behind when it comes to access to essential care.

Clearly, Mayor Bloomberg did some things right. I think he did a very good job on public health. He did a very good job on environment. I think he was right to achieve mayoral control of education. I don’t think he then applied it the right way.

In honor of Surgeon General Koop’s legacy, we should ensure that the position of surgeon general is protected from political interference, funded appropriately and nominated from the ranks of career public health professionals who merit consideration, as is done in the other uniformed services.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures.

It’s been overlooked for a long time as a real public health problem. All of western society is a little bit sleep-deprived, and when I say a little bit, I mean chronically.

Climate change is an economic, public health, and environmental issue that we have a moral responsibility to address.

AIDS is a plague – numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health – though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

We need strong public health institutions to respond to any challenge. We need to deal with critical infrastructure. The reality is that very little money has flowed to communities to help our first responders; to help our hospitals; to help the public health infrastructure.

Public health research has saved countless lives in the past.

The root cause of the looming energy problem – and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health – is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.

In terms of medicine, I’ve generally been pretty interested in public health issues as they relate to sub-Saharan Africa on a broad scale – HIV/AIDS, malaria etc.

For self-driving cars in particular, there are lots of dimensions of this technology beyond just impact on labour. There is a massive potential improvement in public health.

The unhoused crisis in our country is a public health emergency, and a moral and policy failure at every level of our government.

Wanda Sykes and I have had similar career trajectories. We’re both from the D.C. area. She spent five years working as a contracting specialist for the NSA, and I got my master’s in public health.

Since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago, we have lost over 90,000 Americans to gun violence. This is a manmade crisis that needs to be treated as the public health epidemic it has become.

I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health is a great idea.

Legally speaking, the term ‘public rights’ is as vague and indefinite as are the terms ‘public health,’ ‘public good,’ ‘public welfare,’ and the like. It has no legal meaning, except when used to describe the separate, private, individual rights of a greater or less number of individuals.

The FDA serves a real purpose: To protect public health.

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

With the approaching winter the air quality in many Indian cities, especially in Delhi, becomes a public health hazard. Something so fundamental as breathing easy can no longer be taken for granted. It’s a wake-up call worthy of a civic revolution.

In 2009, when I was Health Minister, we re-engineered our business processes to examine the weaknesses and opportunities in our health system. Following that exercise, we established a public health emergency management system from national to district level to prevent and provide rapid response to outbreaks.

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.

We live in a world at constant risk of public health emergencies. In our increasingly interconnected world, public health emergencies can affect anyone, anywhere.

Every single dollar spent lobbying a legislator on behalf of oil and gas is a toxic dollar that undermines public health and safety laws that protect Americans. That’s contamination of the political system.

Citizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don’t create even more illness.

We have been embarked on what I would call a proactive strategy that looks at our gun violence as a public health crisis, which is what it is. That means we look at the root causes of the violence.

Public health depends on winning over hearts and minds. It’s not enough to just have a good policy, you have to convince people to actually follow it.

Harriet Washington, in ‘Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,’ documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system.

I used to work in public health, and the issues were sustainability, how the funds were being delineated, and if the funds were actually helping the people we think they’re helping.

When we see the corrupting influence of political decision making in our public health professionals, we should ask questions.

We should be increasing our investment in the infrastructure for public safety and public health. But when we talk about those as two distinct and separate departments or budgetary items, we’re missing out on the ways in which we should be most effectively using our resources and serving our residents.

If you ask the American people to choose, between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say, accelerate the economy, at the cost of human life. Because no American is going to say how much a life is worth. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority.

Climate change carries implications that stretch far beyond extreme weather, however. The effects on public health are far more alarming – and those have to be taken into account in order to calculate an accurate estimate of the costs of inaction.

The Coronavirus pandemic has three major battle fronts: public health, economic, media. Whatever his flaws, Trump understands that all three battles must be waged.

I am very concerned that federal and state air quality programs do not consider public health in regulating certain classes of industrial air emissions.

If we stay focused on data and the real issues, we can tailor our inventions to enhance public health and safety while decreasing the likelihood of racial discrimination.

I’ve always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me we have this yearning for silver bullets, and that is not in fact how change comes about. Change comes through silver buckshot – a lot of little things that achieve results. That’s a classic public health approach.

Parks represent an efficient, cost-effective way to improve public health.

You can’t have public health without working with the public sector. You can’t have public education without working with the public sector in education.

But if you’re asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.

The influx of families and unaccompanied children at the border poses many risks, including grave public health threats.

Unless you believe that politicians and agencies are above a money grab, especially if it can be justified under the auspices of a public health emergency, then you should favor prudent, careful allocation of resources with accountability on the front end and follow-up after the fact.

The biggest public health challenge is rebuilding health systems. In other words, if you look at cholera or maternal mortality or tuberculosis in Haiti, they’re major problems in Haiti, but the biggest problem is rebuilding systems.

And I believe that the best buy in public health today must be a combination of regular physical exercise and a healthy diet.

I worked at Columbia University’s School of Public Health.

The infrastructure for linking environmental health and public health is not working as well as it should.

There’s no reason to continue including language in the federal spending bill to prohibit the CDC and NIH from studying the causes or effects of gun violence on public health.