What they say about Swine Flu

"We need to work out a public-private partnership between the hospitals to tackle the flu. We need to take the people, doctors and media into confidence so panic does not spread,"
-- Indian Minister of State for health, Dinesh Trivedi

"The virus is still around and ready to explode. We're potentially looking at a very big mess."
-- William Schaffner, an influenza expert at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine who advises federal health officials.

"Everyone recognizes that H1N1 is going to be a challenge for all of us, and there are people who are going to be getting sick in the fall and die,The strategy and the effort on the part of the governments is to make sure we . . . collaborate to minimize the impact."
-- John O. Brennan, the U.S. deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security. "

"This epidemic will transmit faster than usual, because the population is more susceptible. It's fair to say there will be tens of millions of illnesses and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths. That's not atypical. It just depends on how many tens of thousands."
-- Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health

"There was panic and I felt it, too. I was scared. It is three buses to get to work and there were many people on those buses who are coughing."
-- Cristina Malaga, a maid in Buenos Aires who stayed home for a week in July out of fear.

"There's only so much that can be done to get ready. Flu, like a hurricane, is a force of nature. You can't stop it. You can't make it less severe than it would be otherwise. All you can do is try to be prepared to deal with the consequences."
-- Eric Toner of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity.

"It took us some time to realise it, but the truth is that H1N1 is not any worse than other regular human flus,''
-- Dr Pratibha Kulkarni, an internist with Memorial Hermann at Memorial City in Houston.

"Any kind of virus needs moisture or humid weather conditions to multiply and increase its number... since the weather is reasonably dry due to scanty rainfall, there aren't favourable conditions for H1N1 influenza virus to grow"
-- Prof TN Dhole, microbiologist at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow.