Tom Frieden Quotes

The importance in what we're seeing in countries around the world is a poorly regulated and poorly functioning private sector using irrational and ineffective medications that result in the emergence of drug-resistance tuberculosis. What we've done is begun a program to rapidly improve infection control in places that are treating TB patients.

- 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

In addition to pain, disability, and disfigurement, lymphatic filariasis carries a heavy social cost. Those disfigured by the disease are often shunned. Women are often rejected by their families. Both men and women can have difficulty finding jobs.

- Tom Frieden

Vaccines and antibiotics have made many infectious diseases a thing of the past; we've come to expect that public health and modern science can conquer all microbes. But nature is a formidable adversary.

- 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

Flu can be serious, and it kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. Vaccination is easier and more convenient than ever, so get yourself and your family protected.

- Tom Frieden

Pregnant women who are in places where Zika is spreading should do everything they can to avoid mosquito bites. And we, as a society, need to do everything we can to control Zika. That means learning more about it; that means controlling mosquitoes more effectively. That means achieving a vaccine.

- Tom Frieden

What works most effectively for quelling disease outbreaks like Ebola is not quarantining huge populations. What works is focusing on and isolating the sick and those in direct contact with them as they are at highest risk of infection. This strategy worked with SARS, and it worked during the H1N1 flu pandemic.

- Tom Frieden

More than 50 million people around the world died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That's why we have epidemiologists all over the world tracking whether new strains of flu emerge.

- Tom Frieden

To me, as a physician, when 1.78 million of our high school kids have tried an e-cigarette, and a lot of them are using them regularly ... that's like watching someone harm hundreds of thousands of children.

- Tom Frieden

We know how to stop Ebola: by isolating and treating patients, tracing and monitoring their contacts, and breaking the chains of transmission.

- Tom Frieden

Physical activity - even if you don't lose an ounce, you'll live longer, feel healthier and be less likely to get cancer, heart disease, stroke and arthritis. It's the closest thing we have to a wonder drug.

- 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

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

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

Our progress against malaria is impressive. But vigilance remains a critical ingredient to protect the health of all people.

- Tom Frieden

Tobacco marketing often reaches children and youth and entices them to start using tobacco while they are still at an impressionable age. Nearly four out of five high school cigarette smokers will become adult smokers, even if they intend to quit in a few years. By the time they want to quit, they're hooked.

- Tom Frieden

E-cigarettes are a tobacco product.

- 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

A vaccine that prevented tuberculosis would merit a Nobel Prize, but it's just very difficult to develop.

- Tom Frieden

It's understandable that when something new comes out that's unfamiliar, scary, and has severe outcomes, it gets a lot of media attention. In fact, the Zika outbreak is unprecedented. We've never before identified a mosquito-borne infection that can cause fetal malformations.

- Tom Frieden

I think we didn't recognize how hard it would be to care for someone with Ebola who was desperately ill in the U.S., and how much hands-on nursing care there would be, and we didn't expect two nurses to get infected.

- Tom Frieden

Since the first large Zika outbreak ever recognized, in 2007, the CDC has had boots on the ground responding. Our laboratories have developed a test that can confirm Zika in the first week of illness or in a sample from an affected child.

- Tom Frieden

The more we look at drug resistance, the more concerned we are. It basically shows us that the end of the road isn't very far away for antibiotics.

- Tom Frieden

It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently.

- Tom Frieden

Women should use pain medication only as directed and talk with their doctor about all drugs they're taking, including over-the-counter medications. Store prescription drugs in a secure place and properly dispose of them as soon as treatment is over. And never share prescription drugs with anyone else.

- Tom Frieden

In 2011, at least a third of middle school and high school students who smoked cigars used flavored little cigars. Six states - Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Wisconsin - already have youth cigar smoking rates that are the same or higher than youth cigarette smoking.

- Tom Frieden

CDC is supporting community efforts by establishing competitive grants to support local programs to help individuals and families to get healthy and stay healthy.

- 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

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

Mosquito control in the United States is very much a local and state activity. Some states have excellent programs, other states not so much. It's one of the reasons it's so urgent to identify and spread best practices to try and track and reduce mosquito populations.

- 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

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

We do prioritize addressing MDR-TB. We have done that for more than 20 years; that's why we've been able to drastically reduce U.S. cases of MDR-TB.

- 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

Health care providers can follow guidelines for responsible painkiller prescribing and talk with their patients about the risks and benefits of taking prescription painkillers.

- Tom Frieden

We continue to recommend flu vaccine as the single best way to protect yourself against the flu. The vaccine will protect against strains covered in the vaccine, and it may have some effectiveness in the drifted strains.

- Tom Frieden

The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States has caused some to call on the United States to ban travel for anyone from the countries in West Africa facing the worst of the Ebola epidemic. That response is understandable. It's only human to want to protect ourselves and our families.

- Tom Frieden

I eat a lot of fruit because if I fill up on strawberries or an apple, then I'll have one small piece of cheesecake rather than two big pieces.

- Tom Frieden

I love... cheesecake in New York. I love whatever is sweet.

- Tom Frieden

In addition to not stopping the spread of Ebola, isolating countries will make it harder to respond to Ebola, creating an even greater humanitarian and health care emergency. Importantly, isolating countries won't keep Ebola contained and away from American shores.

- Tom Frieden

Communities across the nation play an important role in leading the way toward healthier families, and the Affordable Care Act helps make prevention an important priority for every community.

- Tom Frieden

People traveling to malaria-prone areas can protect themselves by taking steps such as taking antimalarial drugs, using insect repellent, sleeping under insecticide-treated bed-nets, and wearing protective clothing.

- 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

New, unfamiliar, and mysterious threats to our health are scary. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - where we identify, on average, one new health threat each year - we work around the clock with an approach that prioritizes finding out what we need to know as fast as we can to protect Americans.

- Tom Frieden

Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it's really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.

- Tom Frieden

As director of the CDC, one of the best parts of my job is announcing good news.

- Tom Frieden

When my son was little, he asked me: 'Daddy, which is worser, sugar or salt?' I still don't know the answer.

- Tom Frieden

Using prescription drug monitoring programs is an important step in identifying patients who may be improperly using prescription painkillers.

- 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

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

I've treated so many adults who are desperate - desperate - to get off tobacco. They all started as kids. I see the industry getting another generation of our kids addicted.

- Tom Frieden

Vaccination is the single most important step people can take to protect themselves from influenza.

- Tom Frieden

Congress did the right thing with Ebola. They funded us to protect Americans and keep us safer.

- Tom Frieden

At CDC, we work 24/7 to save lives and protect people.

- Tom Frieden

If we vaccinate well, if we increase those vaccination rates, we can stop measles just as we stopped it before.

- 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

The bottom line is, if you're pregnant, don't travel to an area where Zika is spreading.

- Tom Frieden

Haiti is not an easy place to fight disease, even in the best of times. That was true even before a devastating earthquake ravaged Haiti's capital and largest city, Port-au-Prince, in 2010.

- Tom Frieden

We have to keep up our guard. We won't get the risk of Ebola to zero in the U.S. until we stop it in West Africa. And Ebola is hard to fight. It requires intensity. It requires speed and flexibility.

- Tom Frieden

Reducing MRSA infections is critical because these bacteria are difficult to treat and are common in healthcare settings, especially among ICU (intensive care unit) patients.

- 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

It is remarkable how surprising Zika has been. This is the first time we have had a mosquito-borne infection that can cause a devastating birth defect.

- Tom Frieden

From all the available evidence, the body has an excellent immune response to Zika. Therefore, once you get it once, you will never get it again.

- Tom Frieden

The Zika virus invades and disrupts the development of the fetal brain, but the effects on the brains of infants and young children are unknown.

- 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

Some hospitals screen all ICU patients and isolate those with MRSA, a process that can be challenging for both caregivers and patients.

- 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

We want people to take responsibility for how healthy they are, and we want to help them live longer, healthier lives.

- Tom Frieden