Quotes About Epidemics

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

I think the world should unite and focus on strong health systems to prepare the whole world to prevent epidemics - or if there is an outbreak, to manage it quickly - because viruses don't respect borders, and they don't need visas.

Do no harm was part of Hippocrates's writing, but from a different text. On epidemics.

Epidemics of childish ailments spread like a powder trail through the uprooted recruits, and many a village lad who had swaggered into the ranks with heroic ideas of fighting the Germans spent his first weeks as a soldier fighting a fever, scratching his spots or nursing a painful case of mumps.

Pandemics often come in waves, and the cumulative "morbidity" rate—the number of people who get sick in all the waves combined—often exceeds 50 percent.

There are three different types of influenza viruses: A, B, and C. Type C rarely causes disease in humans. Type B does cause disease, but not epidemics. Only influenza A viruses cause epidemics or pandemics, an epidemic being a local or national outbreak, a pandemic a worldwide one.

Antigen drift can create epidemics. One study found nineteen discrete, identifiable epidemics in the United States in a thirty-three-year period—more than one every other year. Each one caused between ten thousand and forty thousand "excess deaths" in the United States alone—an excess over and above the death toll usually caused by the disease. As a result influenza kills more people in the United States than any other infectious disease, including AIDS.

When a disease is very deadly, it kills its victims so rapidly that the pathogen does not have much time to spread. This is why the super-deadly Ebola epidemics that kindle in Africa every few years tend to burn out.

Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights. Bullets are cheap and full of big dramatic pictures. Some bullets are true virtuals that allow people to experience—safely—hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and mass murder. Hell of a kick.