Margaret Chan Community Quotations

The international community should treat this as a window of opportunity to ramp up preparedness and response.

New diseases like SARS and bird flu cause anxiety in the community. People get worried, some to the extent that it even affects their health. You feel very sad, and yet you must carry on and maintain your cool in very trying and difficult moments. You have to tough it out.

This change to a higher phase of alert is a signal to governments, to ministries of health and other ministries, to the pharmaceutical industry and the business community that certain actions now should be undertaken with increased urgency and at an accelerated pace.

That was a time when we were really working together as an international community of academics, politicians, public health experts. Everybody really was so focused,

We must understand that when one country is not safe, the world is not safe. Pandemic influenza, by nature, will go around the world, so it is important for us to work as an international community to get a better handle on the issue.

For the first time in human history, we have a chance to prepare ourselves for a pandemic before it arrives, ... It is incumbent upon the global community to act now.