Dick Thompson Seas Quotations

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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,

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.

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.

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

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