Quotes About Epidemics

History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.

We need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into economic theory. Otherwise, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable, very important mechanism for economic change, as well as a crucial element for economic forecasting. If we do not understand the epidemics of popular narratives, we do not fully understand changes in the economy and in economic behavior.

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.

Many diseases including malaria, dengue, meningitis - just a few examples - these are what we call climate-sensitive diseases, because such climate dimensions for rainfall, humidity and temperature would influence the epidemics, the outbreaks, either directly influencing the parasites or the mosquitoes that carry them.

What it means, though, is that the law of the few is not one, but two hypotheses that have been mashed together: first that some people are more influential than others; and second, that the influence of these people is greatly magnified by some contagion process that generates social epidemics.

Just as forest fires require a conspiracy of wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel to rage out of control over large tracts of land, social epidemics require just the right conditions to be satisfied by the network of influence.

Just as we demand that our governments address risks associated with terrorism or epidemics, we should put concerted pressure on them to act now to preserve our natural environment and curb climate change.

La guerra y las epidemias ya no tienen efecto sobre los hombres, contra tales cosas ellos están armados por su insensibilidad espiritual.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Sources: Wikipedia's entries on "Malaria," "Polio," "Cholera," "Typhoid fever," "Measles

Epidemics stop only when the microbes get disgusted with their toxins.

There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.

In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of stickiness.

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.

Of the three, the third trait—the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment—is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The

To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people-Salesmen-with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.

This idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we regard social epidemics as well. We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious — how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn't go in one ear and out the other.

To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.

Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.

Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.

As the French cognitive scientist Dan Sperber put it, cultures are epidemics of mental representations.