Quotes About Epidemiology

Pneumonia is a disease that often flies under the radar of not just the public but even the global health community. It kills more children under 5 years old every year than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

When doctors think they've eradicated a disease, they stop looking for it. So if the disease itself suddenly shows up again, they may not even recognize it; they may even mistake it for an entirely new one.

Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection. The

But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

Sick animals can lead to sick people.

The difference between H7N9 and H5N1, is that H5N1 kills chickens very rapidly, so it is easy to identify where the infected flocks of chickens are. H7N9 doesn't make the chicken sick, so it has been difficult to pinpoint where the infected chickens are.

Many experts believe that a cholera-like pandemic looms. In a survey by the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, 90 percent of epidemiologists said that a pandemic that will sicken 1 billion, kill up to 165 million, and trigger a global recession that could cost up to $3 trillion would occur sometime in the next two generations.

the virtual elimination of infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life," the virologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet wrote in 1951.2 "To write about infectious disease," he added in 1962, "is almost to write of something that has passed into history.

It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.

No one knew why some people were superspreaders:

There was no vaccine in sight; and the number of infections required to achieve herd immunity could be calculated, as it was a simple function of the reproductive rate. (The formula was 1 ? 1/R0, where R0 was the reproduction number.)

Carter invented a name for what they were doing. "Redneck epidemiology," he called it.

In 2011, an interesting milestone in human history was passed. For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined.1 We live in an age in which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle. We are in effect choosing how we shall die, albeit without much reflection or insight.

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

Superspreading is especially likely to occur for diseases that have substantial incubation periods

Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens.

Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens. In another study in Bangladesh, they examined a bat called the Indian flying fox and tried to identify every single virus that calls it home. They identified 55 species, 50 of which are new to science.

The principle of critical mass is so simple that it is no wonder that it shows up in epidemiology, fashion, survival and extinction of species, language systems, racial integration, jaywalking, panic behavior, and political movements.

The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977,

We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history.

The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

In South America, he estimated, the minimum probability that a pathogen in one host will next encounter a host with a similar immune spectrum is about 28 percent; in Europe, the chance is less than 2 percent. As a result, Black argued, "people of the New World are unusually susceptible to diseases of the Old.