We’ve put huge resources into predicting tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. HIV/AIDS is like an earthquake that’s lasted 30 years and touched every country on the planet. We have such incredible capacity to think about the future, it’s time we used it to predict biological threats. Otherwise we’ll be blindsided again and again. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet – microorganisms like bacteria and viruses. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
When there is an influenza threat, drop everything and focus on risks from influenza pandemics. When SARS spreads, focus on unknown respiratory diseases. This approach helps to quell public concern, but it’s a hugely inefficient way to deal with future risks. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage – when they’re first entering human populations, preferably before they’ve had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they’ve had a chance to spread – we can head off pandemics altogether. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
We live in a world fraught with risk from new pandemics. Fortunately, we also now live in an era with the tools to build a global immune system. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely… And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
We see new things all the time. We see new retroviruses out there – which is the category that HIV falls into – and we’re very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we’ve reached a point where we’ve discovered most of the things. I’m going tell you right now: Please don’t despair. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
We may have charted all the continents on the planet, and we may have discovered all the mammals, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left to explore on Earth. Nathan Wolfe Read Quote
