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

Anyone that’s involved in development has discovered that all the good work that’s been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

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.

Medical costs are of concern, both in developing and developed countries.

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

It’s OK for China to invent cancer drugs that cure patients in the United States. We want them to catch up. But as the leader, we want to keep setting a very, very high standard. We don’t want them to catch up because we’re slowing down or, even worse, going into reverse.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

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.

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

The first time I ever saw snow skis was when I was 62 years old and that was 19 years ago and I’m still skiing. So, we’ll be skiing with some very close friends of the Carter Center letting them know what the Carter Center is doing around the world. We have programs in over 65 countries.

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.

Health is certainly extremely important, and we’ve done a number of things at Facebook to help improve global health and work in that area, and I am excited to do more there, too. But the reality is that it’s not an either-or. People need to be healthy and be able to have the Internet as a backbone to connect them to the whole economy.

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

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.

Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.