Georges Benjamin Quotations

No one should fool anyone that this is going to happen overnight ... because the health system is so complex.

If we do all this work, and there's no pandemic, you still have 36,000 people die every year of seasonal flu, and you could make a big dent in that. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

I think the overall response was deplorable in terms of the timing and there's plenty of blame go around, but I think the overall public health response was heroic.

People are eating out of (nonworking) refrigerators. They think it's good because it's still a little cool.

People are eating out of (non-working) refrigerators. They think it's good because it's still a little cool.

Nations are dealing with this on their own because of fears of an impact on trade. We continue to see situations where nations are not as aggressive as they could be off the bat.

The question is: what happens with our existing funding? We've already had $100 million in reductions in public-health grants in the president's 2006 budget request. Public health is still in a big hole.

What often happens in a situation like this is people latch onto very concrete things, like buying vaccine. That's not readiness. That's stockpiling. We have got to have first responders who know what their role is, people who can get shots into people's arms quickly, and hospitals who can handle patients.

The threat is very serious and will only increase as the days go by without the waters receding.

The most frustrating thing to me is that FedEx can do that sort of detailed tracking of what it ships, but public health officials can't do the same thing with flu vaccine. The knowledge of where exactly vaccine is ought to be a public resource. We have a lot of work to do.

This comparative information is extremely important because it is an indication that we as a nation have not achieved optimal health.

A lot of the problems occur when people think everything's back to normal when in fact it isn't.

There's a wave here and we should ride it. It's a terrible tragedy that's potentially there, but we should use it as an opportunity to address what we believe are long-standing areas of neglect in rebuilding the public health infrastructure.

It's an illusory cost-shift. These people just don't have the money.

This is concerning to all of us the health-care community and should be of equal concern to all Americans. We must find ways to reverse this negative trend.

In an era during which new and re-emerging diseases, such as the H5N1 avian flu virus, are potential public health threats, Americans should not forget to take the proper precautions to protect their health against the diseases that threaten us today.

This is mosquito country. There is the risk of explosive breeding of mosquitoes, as well as rats and rodents.

You don't have to get 100 percent compliance. As long as you get representative samples of all of the various groups, the bird surveillance serves as an early warning system for us.

The genetic evolution we're observing is very worrisome. The threat is real. It's already a pandemic in birds.