The way Zika spreads is primarily through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in places that don’t have screens and air-conditioning. – Tom Frieden
The bottom line is that Ebola is hard to treat, and when the first patient ever with Ebola came to the United States, we thought the guidelines would protect the health care workers. – Tom Frieden
The way we work in public health is, we make the best recommendations and decisions based on the best available data. – Tom Frieden
The United States has made remarkable progress in reducing both teen pregnancy and racial and ethnic differences, but the reality is, too many American teens are still having babies. – Tom Frieden
Too many U.S. adults have a heart age years older than their real age, increasing their risk of heart disease and stroke. Everybody deserves to be young – or at least not old – at heart. – Tom Frieden
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. – 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. – Tom Frieden
Between 2000 and 2010, malaria mortality rates fell by 26 percent around the world. According to the latest World Health Organization estimates, there were about 219 million cases of malaria in 2010 and an estimated 660,000 deaths. – Tom Frieden
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. – Tom Frieden
Thanks to malaria elimination efforts in United States in the 1940s, most people in the U.S. today have never had any direct contact with the disease, and most doctors have never seen a case. That success means it’s easy to have a relaxed attitude about protecting ourselves. – Tom Frieden
Cigars, cigarettes, and hookah tobacco are all smoked tobacco – addictive and deadly. We need effective action to protect our kids from struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine. – Tom Frieden
People have a misconception that the tobacco epidemic is a thing of the past. Tobacco still kills more Americans than any other cause. – Tom Frieden
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. – Tom Frieden
A vaccine that prevented tuberculosis would merit a Nobel Prize, but it’s just very difficult to develop. – Tom Frieden
Know that the tiger mosquito – Aedes albopictus – sometimes spreads viruses that spread like Zika, so it may be able to spread Zika. – Tom Frieden
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. – Tom Frieden
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. – Tom Frieden
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. – Tom Frieden
If we vaccinate well, if we increase those vaccination rates, we can stop measles just as we stopped it before. – Tom Frieden
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. – Tom Frieden
