Quotes About Epidemiology

One of the most important problems in epidemiology is to ascertain whether this termination occurs only when no susceptible individuals are left, or whether the interplay of the various factors of infectivity, recovery and mortality, may result in termination, whilst many susceptible individuals are still present in the unaffected population.

So much for where as well as when. AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908 (give or take a margin of error), and grew slowly but inexorably from there.

SIR model, representing a flow of individuals, during the course of an outbreak, through those three classes I mentioned earlier: from susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recovered (R). Anderson

A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others.

It was the first coronavirus ever found to inflict serious illness upon humans. (Several other coronaviruses are among the many viral strains responsible for common colds. Still others cause hepatitis in mice, gastroenteritis in pigs, and respiratory infection in turkeys.) SARS-CoV has no ominous ring.

about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.

AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908

This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.

Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity.

In a long-range study of 91,000 nurses over twelve years, the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard showed that the risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women is twice as high in those who eat red meat more than once a day as in those who consume it less than three times a week .97 The risk of breast cancer could therefore be halved simply by reducing consumption of red meat.

I'll bet you a six-pack of Coors that pretty soon, people will be discovering Cretaceous parasites inside Cretaceous bones. The possibility of looking into epidemiology and pathology is pretty cool.

Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

Un virus español puede abrirse camino hasta el Congo o Tahití en menos de veinticuatro horas. Por lo tanto, no habría sido descabellado esperar un infierno epidemiológico, con un envite tras otro de enfermedades letales.

Our studies have shown that all cases of typhoid of this type have arisen by contact, that is, carried directly from one person to another. There was no trace of a connection to drinking water.

Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons, that constitutes a public health issue.

It's extremely likely that the people who have never been exposed to a human who has leprosy, it's very likely they got leprosy from exposure to an armadillo.

Outbreaks are inevitable but pandemics are optional," says Larry Brilliant

I've always been interested in pandemics, where they come from, how they arise, and the key feature which really fascinates me is that the biology of the bug is the least of it.

Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.

Accurate diagnostics are key to enabling successful public health measures.

Pandemics do not occur randomly. From malaria and influenza to AIDS and SARS, the lethal microbes have come, in the first instance, from animals, especially wild animals. And we increasingly know which parts of the world pose the greatest risk for future incursions.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

Aside from all that, we recall that antibodies to malaria and other diseases prevalent in Africa show up as HIV-positive on tests.