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.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Nature
The way we work in public health is, we make the best recommendations and decisions based on the best available data.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Teen
Our progress against malaria is impressive. But vigilance remains a critical ingredient to protect the health of all people.
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.
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.
I love... cheesecake in New York. I love whatever is sweet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
E-cigarettes are a tobacco product.
People have a misconception that the tobacco epidemic is a thing of the past. Tobacco still kills more Americans than any other cause.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we vaccinate well, if we increase those vaccination rates, we can stop measles just as we stopped it before.
The bottom line is, if you're pregnant, don't travel to an area where Zika is spreading.
Congress did the right thing with Ebola. They funded us to protect Americans and keep us safer.
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.
Know that the tiger mosquito - Aedes albopictus - sometimes spreads viruses that spread like Zika, so it may be able to spread Zika.
The way Zika spreads is primarily through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in places that don't have screens and air-conditioning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We know how to stop Ebola: by isolating and treating patients, tracing and monitoring their contacts, and breaking the chains of transmission.
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.
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.
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.
A vaccine that prevented tuberculosis would merit a Nobel Prize, but it's just very difficult to develop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Health care providers can follow guidelines for responsible painkiller prescribing and talk with their patients about the risks and benefits of taking prescription painkillers.
Using prescription drug monitoring programs is an important step in identifying patients who may be improperly using prescription painkillers.
As director of the CDC, one of the best parts of my job is announcing good news.
At CDC, we work 24/7 to save lives and protect people.