Political Quotes

“we do not have to be reminded of the more than 50 million lives lost in the 1918 influenza pandemic or the many thousands lost in the SARS, Ebola, MERS, and other recent infectious disease outbreaks to recognize that far more must be done to reduce the risk of catastrophic pandemics. Rather than waiting until disease outbreaks occur, then scrambling at great expense for 2 or 3 years or however long it takes to develop a vaccine while countless people die, we need to act proactively. It is worth noting that tens of millions of people have died, and we still lack a vaccine against HIV. Viral threats will continue to emerge at a rapidly accelerating pace in response to expanding global populations in the least developed countries, international travel, and human encroachment into wildlife habitat. And we know that the vast majority of emerging viruses, like HIV, are zoonotic--infectious diseases that can spread between animals and humans. In an effort to strengthen global capacity for detection and discovery of zoonotic viruses, the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, initiated the PREDICT project in 2009. Its goal was to identify new emerging viruses with pandemic potential and improve predictive modeling to better focus surveillance, data collection, and analytics to reduce the risk of animal viruses spilling over and spreading in human populations.…”