Quotes About Epidemics

Calculus is the mathematics of change. It describes everything from the spread of epidemics to the zigs and zags of a well-thrown curveball. The subject is gargantuan—and so are its textbooks. Many exceed a thousand pages and work nicely as doorstops.

some of Gilead's key medicines were developed on grants funded by taxpayers.18 Gilead, for its part, sees epidemics as a growth market, and it has an aggressive marketing campaign to encourage businesses and individuals to stockpile Tamiflu, just in case.

When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.

Epidemics historically have tended to kill the very young and the very old, but AIDS is different: Those ages 20 to 40 are most affected, which means that so far over 12 million African children have been orphaned because of AIDS.

Las fantasías existen y pueden ser tan reales y tan nocivas y peligrosas como los estados físicos. Opino, también, que los trastornos anímicos son harto más peligrosos que las epidemias o terremotos. Ni las epidemias de cólera o de viruela medievales han matado a tantos hombres como ciertas discrepancias de opinión en el año 1914 o ciertos -ideales- políticos en Rusia.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

Despite extensive travel, we no longer have plagues and epidemics.

There are two categories in which random events fall: Mediocristan and Extremistan. Mediocristan is thin-tailed and affects the individual without correlation to the collective. Extremistan, by definition, affects many people. Hence Extremistan has a systemic effect that Mediocristan doesn't. Multiplicative risks—such as epidemics—are always from Extremistan. They may not be lethal (say, the flu), but they remain from Extremistan.

As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will be more acute—we will have a germ population dominated by a few numbers, and the successful killer will spread vastly more effectively.

Colonial writers knew that disease tilled the virgin soil of the Americas countless times in the sixteenth century. But what they did not, could not, know is that the epidemics shot out like ghastly arrows from the limited areas they saw to every corner of the hemisphere, wreaking destruction in places that never appeared in the European historical record.

SOUTH RICHMOND was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics, baloney sandwiches—and men who knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris.

The priorities of the traditional state were defense, public order, the prevention of epidemics and the aversion of mass discontent. But following World War II, and peaking around 1980, social expenditure became the main budgetary responsibility for modern states.

History shows that epidemics have been the great resetter of countries' economy and social fabric. Why should it be different with COVID-19?

If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease] or earthquakes.

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

Almost all of the big epidemics that we've seen in the last decade-plus have come from fruit bats that normally pollinate the rain forest. And as the rain forest is under stress and the upper canopies are getting overheated, desperate bat populations are moving closer and closer into human areas and passing their viruses to our livestock, and eventually to us.

Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.

The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus miracles attested to, and scapegoats--such as Jews or witches--hunted down and burned.

Infections and Inequalities

Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose Sanitary Report proved to be a bestseller for the Stationery Office in 1842, confirmed that, every year, 20,000 adults and 30,000 youths and children were 'imperfectly interred' in less than 218 acres of burial ground, 'closely surrounded by the abodes of the living'.2

Universal last names are a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Tracking property ownership and inheritance, collecting taxes, maintaining court records, performing police work, conscripting soldiers, and controlling epidemics were all made immeasurably easier by the clarity of full names and, increasingly, fixed addresses.

Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.