Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live.

The tool that’s most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.

Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there’s only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.

I think it’s so important for girls to love themselves and to treat their bodies respectfully.

Widespread use of antibiotics promotes the spread of antibiotic resistance. Smart use of antibiotics is the key to controlling its spread.

Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‚to do‘ list.

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

Most women in my family start to get sick and start dying in their 40s, and I am going to be very happy to become 50 and 60. I love getting older.

The world has been very careful to pick very few diseases for eradication, because it is very tough.

I think women want to take care of themselves, and I think having a voice in how that is done is very important.

I think it’s horrible that people have to be told. Don’t smoke! Everybody knows it’s bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

You’ve got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother – my mother’s mother – who used to go to villages in India in her little VW bug. My grandmother would take a bullhorn and make sure women in these villages knew how to access birth control.

Measles will always show you if someone isn’t doing a good job on vaccinations. Kids will start dying of measles.

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

My – both my sisters died with pancreatic cancer. My brother died with pancreatic cancer. My daddy died of pancreatic cancer. My mother died with breast cancer.

Every woman is different when they go through menopause, and… I didn’t know emotionally how I would feel.

I’m opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education, or public health, period.

We all live with cancer, whether it is present in ourselves or affects someone we love.

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.

We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country.

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.

If there is even one woman out there who went and got checked and found that she had cancer or she was positive and she caught something in time, and if in any small way I was a part of that, it makes me very emotional.

In low-income countries, getting to a health post is hard. It’s very expensive.

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.

Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.

The ideal thing would be to have a 100 percent effective AIDS vaccine. And to have broad usage of that vaccine. That would literally break the epidemic.

The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.

I certainly respect the belief of the Hobby Lobby owners. On the other hand, they have no constitutional right to foist that belief on the hundreds and hundreds of women who work for them who don’t share that belief.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny.

Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.

I believe we have to nip Ebola in the bud before it spreads through Africa and to other countries.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

Remember a few years ago when Congress declared that the sauce on a slice of pizza should count as a vegetable in school lunches? You don’t have to be a nutritionist to know that this doesn’t make much sense.

The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

For Africa to move forward, you’ve really got to get rid of malaria.

In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases.

The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can’t breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.

‚Whole Women’s Health‘ made it very clear that poor women were no longer going to be left out.

Some very poor countries run great vaccination systems, and some richer ones run terrible programs.

I’m interested in women’s health because I’m a woman. I’d be a darn fool not to be on my own side.

Middle-income countries are the biggest users of GMOs. Places like Brazil.

I do not believe that government should be in the business of telling women what they should do with their bodies.