Margaret Chan People Quotations

For a pandemic of moderate severity, this is one of our greatest challenges: helping people to understand when they do not need to worry, and when they do need to seek urgent care.

If the country has invested in the training of doctors or nurses or midwives for that matter, people are beginning to say, 'Should we not ask them to serve a number of years in the country who invested in their training?' I think this is now coming to be an interesting discussion.

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.

At a time of multiple calamities in the world, we cannot allow the loss of essential antimicrobials, essential cures for many millions of people, to become the next global crisis.

[we have]taming of an ancient disease [malaria] that over the centuries has killed untold millions of people.