Dick Thompson Quotes (43 Quotes)

There are a lot of scary stories out there about the next pandemic, but we have to make difficult decisions without a lot of information. The real answer is we don't know until the next pandemic virus appears.

I hope we are not creating a sense of panic... because we need the public's trust to encourage governments to begin or continue pandemic preparedness efforts.

From our point of view, Iraqi authorities have done a very good job in responding to the outbreak and have been very transparent about what is known about the human disease.

There is really no time frame. As long as the virus is circulating it could jump into humans.

The genetically modified food industry recognizes that they need to have consumer confidence in order to push ahead. The failure of GM foods in Europe was directly linked to the consumers' lack of faith in their government food regulators.

The widespread concern may be bad communication on our part. Millions of animals have been infected and very rarely have humans been infected,

It is always worrying to have a new case in a new country because it raises concerns among the public. But we have to understand that so far this is just one case.

As long as this disease exists anywhere that it's a threat everywhere,

That's because we looked at what happened in the 1918 pandemic. That caused the greatest number of deaths ever recorded from an infectious disease in a single year, by far. More than the black plague, more than any other infectious disease,

There seems to be a heightened sense of concern about an extraordinarily rare disease. It is very, very, very difficult for humans to acquire, even with direct exposure.

We don't have positive confirmation of H5N1 in the girl yet. The laboratory samples should have reached the UK this morning.

These are not our viruses and this isn't our information.

I think it's significant because it draws our attention to the fact that this is a very, very difficult disease to get for humans.

That was an extreme of an already rare event. Pandemics normally have more modest death rates.

You have to put this in perspective there have been 180 million birds that have been killed because of this disease and yet we've identified fewer than 200 human cases.

What this virus can't do now is move easily from person to person. We worry that it could develop this characteristic of human-to-human transmission.

Tens of millions of birds have been affected. But there have been only about 117 human cases in two years. This is a very difficult disease to move from animals to humans.

When the virus shows up in a new country, it doesn't mean that the pandemic has started, it means that the animal disease has spread.

We need to identify the source of this child's exposure. It has to be in the environment somewhere and we need to identify that before going ahead in assessing control or (bird) elimination efforts.

The point was initially to allow us to have access to these samples. It's not like WHO is trying to prevent scientists everywhere from getting this information.

We are concerned that the virus infects a human that already has contracted a strain of normal influenza and this influenza will mix with this avian form. As a result, a new strain could be formed that the human immune system has never seen before and that would ignite a pandemic.

We cannot let our guard down until this disease is put back in a box.

There is definitely concern about Egypt. In a relatively short period of time we have what is really a large number of cases.

We think that this is the most reasoned position, ... you could pick almost any number.

What would emerge would be a disease as deadly as avian influenza, which currently has a case fatality rate of over 50, but that moves as easily as seasonal influenza does from person to person.

You could pick almost any number. There is this vast range of numbers, absolutely. One of those numbers will turn out to be right. All of this is guesswork, nobody knows.

We keep encouraging countries to develop a plan because a pandemic is inevitable.

There's an urgent need to sample and tag and track as many of these species as feasible, especially considering the narrow time frame that we've got available to do it. We need more information on the migratory routes regarding these birds.

Bird flu is a disease among animals it's very difficult for this virus to move from poultry into humans. Our concern is that it will change in a way that will allow it to easily move between humans, and that will trigger a pandemic.

The outbreaks in those areas are being contained, ... There's still disease, but the disease is largely contained in hospitals.

We can confirm that the 15-year-old girl was infected with the H5N1 avian flu virus as a result of the London testing.

It was not unexpected. There will be sporadic human cases as long as the virus is circulating in animals.

The crisis ... may seem more intense now because birds in Europe have become infected.

We're not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins. You could pick almost any number.

Ninety percent of the cases that we know about in Hong Kong and Hanoi are hospital workers and the remaining cases are people who were in close contact with hospital workers,

During SARS, we worked like hell to contain a global outbreak. Now we're trying to feel our way through this next generation of problems.

The outbreak is in northern Iraq. There are lots of challenges there, largely associated with terrain and weather. It's cold and wet, and there are steep sided valleys that the team is moving through.

You could pick any numberthere's this vast rangeand any of these numbers could be right,

People confuse it with pandemic influenza, but they're very different diseases,

There have been something like 180 million birds that have died either directly from the disease or been culled because they were exposed to it. Yet it's taken us all this time -- more than two years, almost three years now -- to cross this barrier.

We have totally discounted the possibility of an avian influenza infection. But we can't take away the possibility of an appearance in Iraq, as many cases have been reported in Turkey.

This is a disease that's appearing in the developing world. So what you want is affordable drugs,

There is very little science in this area. However, we know that people who have spent a great deal of time around infected chickens, for example, only rarely get infected themselves. If it is an extremely rare event to get infected from a flock of infected chickens, it is likely that infections from cats is even rarer still. But again, there is little real evidence to guide us.