Osterholm Quotes

"Sao Paulo had very little Zika activity — that's a city that is ripe for a major epidemic. It's just a matter of the wrong mosquito infecting the wrong population, and then you've got an epidemic."

"One little bottlecap in a ditch can serve as a wonderful breeding site for mosquitoes like this."

"When it comes to landfills and [deer] carcass disposal, scalability is a huge issue that needs to be addressed. How do we — in a CWD positive area — best dispose of these carcasses? There's a lot more work that needs to be done."

"Even though we have all these new modern technologies and have wealth around the world, we still are very vulnerable to the infectious agents and we've done very little to really right the ship and make us better prepared."

"Given the longer hold times of these kids ... this is a perfect recipe for an influenza outbreak in the kids, which will in turn seed the adult population, both detainees and workers, for a much higher risk of influenza."

"Hunters are a valuable part of herd management of [deer] to help reduce more animal contact that could spread chronic wasting disease. We have every reason to support hunting; we just want to make sure the animals that are killed are safe to eat."

"You're not only protecting the kids for themselves, but you're also helping protect those communities where those kids are located. I can guarantee you that if influenza virus gets into a facility where there are a number of young children not previously vaccinated or who have not had influenza in the last several years, you're going to see a lot of influenza activity."

"I think the message here is that although CWD is a real concern, we can manage it in terms of human risk by developing the testing and making it available. ... And we need national leadership badly."

"We need to do hunter education as to why they should be testing their animals, and we need to devise new and better [CWD] tests. That’s the kind of research that we need to support."

"[CWD is] a very important economic issue. Hunting in Minnesota [contributes] an estimated $1 billion to the state’s economy. That’s just one state"

"We don’t know what the risk [of CWD transmitting to humans] is, but I would never tell you it’s zero. I’m not going to tell you it’s going to happen tomorrow, but at the same time, having been through BSE [bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or 'mad cow'] and remembering how all those people provided all those assurances only to be proven wrong 10 years later, I worry about it."

"So today we can take no comfort in having no human [CWD] cases yet. That doesn’t tell us anything. If you have a [prion] disease, you may have a 10-or-more-year incubation period.…Also, the prions continue to change."

"One of the problems is that once the [CWD] prion is excreted into the environment, it may last for many, many years. This thing is heat stable up to 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit."

"The strains that are changing are changing to be much more like the human-prion proteins that we worry about."

"If people don't take [chronic wasting disease] very seriously or even discard the kind of information that says, 'Don’t eat CWD products in venison,' and they wait until we have evidence of CWD transmission to humans, I feel like then we'll really fall off the cliff on CWD."

"Public health is really closely tied to the social, political and economic issues of the world. Where they go awry, public health can quickly go awry."

"We have a gas can with an Ebola match hitting it. If this gets into large metropolitan areas, it's going to be like a gas tanker with an Ebola match hitting it."

"This may seem like a lot of money to invest in this, but it’s going to cost the world a lot more if we don’t get this under control."

"We must understand the risk of transmission of CWD prions to humans with the ever increasing consumption of infected venison and how we reduce the possibility that one day we may have a tragic replay of a bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease-like scenario in North America."

"This is again another one of those unfortunate situations where the science fiction of these issues" overwhelms the truth.