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Great Britain had a much different situation than we do and did here in the United States, in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks. Their infectivity in this disease happened before very much was known about it.

Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia.

The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

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.

In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.

If you find diseases before they've really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.

Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it's really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.