Dr. Gerberding Quotations

Until we have electronic health records, we're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, by Mom's recall sometimes.

We have no information to suggest any problem with the vaccine.

I don't think we were expecting it to be so dramatic so quickly this year. We just didn't feel it was responsible to wait three more days during a holiday weekend to let clinicians know.

Part of the reason why we hoped to have full appropriation committed ... was to warrant to the manufacturers that we are serious.

Local public health agencies are the front line in all of this. Preparedness, at its heart, is a local phenomenon.

We have more than 1,000 cases reported from eight states, and we also have additional cases undergoing investigation in seven more states.

We're watching a very specific virus move very quickly through a very large population of birds and continuously evolve. That's worrisome.

We know the virus is changing. We're watching little mutations occur all the time -- that's what flu viruses do.

We are increasingly not just going out to solve the outbreak related to the contaminated potato salad at the church picnic, but we are on the front line of global challenges.

We're doing the same thing others are doing. We have to look at opportunities for us to invest resources to have the best possible impact and at some programs that have been around for long time that may not be doing as well.

We will do everything we can to help quench it at its source.

This really is the first credible evidence of a biological basis for chronic fatigue syndrome. It reflects the remarkable confluence of a number of scientific advances that are coming to bear on a problem of great importance to many people in the U.S. It's an important step forward in the field of chronic fatigue syndrome research.

We've got to get a vaccine supply that we can count on. We've got to get more and better antiviral drugs. And we've got to have every single link in our public health system as strong as it can be so we can detect this problem and do the things at the local community level that we need to do to save lives.

We will not be surprised if we see more people affected either in college context or as students spend time with their families or with their community friends. We will continue to see an extension of this outbreak into the community level.

We certainly will not see a complete end of mumps when this cycle is broken.

Currently, fewer than half of health care workers get vaccinated for flu each year. When people who work in hospitals and health care facilities don't get vaccinated, they can pose a serious risk to their patients.

These are really tough problems, and we don't have an answer we can hand you in a cookbook.

Our current situation now is not a good situation. We have these ongoing and widespread outbreaks.

This is not media hype. This is a real issue for us.

A lot of clinicians have never seen a case of mumps.

The best protection against the mumps is the vaccine.

If you are a bird, this is a pandemic.

Cigarette smoking continues to impose substantial health and financial costs on individuals and society. If we want to significantly reduce the toll in this decade, we must provide the 32 million smokers who say they want to quit with the tools and support to do so successfully.

But it really takes a lot of time and a lot of money. There are a lot of black boxes out there where something could emerge and we won't be able to find it.

Hope is not a strategy. We have to plan.

The child-bearing years are an exciting time in a woman's life and there are a number of steps they can take to be healthy, benefiting both them and their future child.

The financial and economic impact of injuries in the United States is serious. However, by expanding our science-based, injury-prevention programs, we can drastically reduce these costs and even more importantly help people live longer and healthier lives.

The lesson here is that flu constantly evolves, and we are always just one mutation away from a resistant virus.

The late 50s and early 60s are a crucial time to focus on disease prevention. It's never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle to enjoy a longer, healthier life.