Quotes About Infection

A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

If you touch these dead ones, if you have intercourse with the world, if you build up a friendship with it, and if you have your living among it, you are touching dead bodies. If you touch dead bodies, you will surely be infected and defiled with impurities.

If you spend enough time reading someone else's thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you. Your grasp on yourself becomes tenuous. Or you begin to see that you never were the essential you in the first place, Iona thinks to herself as she takes the bus back to Angel. To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call 'you'.

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. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health.

It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there's a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can't persist indefinitely as an endemic, circulating infection. This is known as the critical community size (CCS), an important parameter in disease dynamics.

The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode—

Spillover" is the term used by disease ecologists (it has a different use for economists) to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another. It's a focused event.

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial.

I think the virus is present all the time, within reservoir species," he told me. "And sometimes there is transmission from reservoir species to other species.

Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. They stand as reminders that not every bad, stubborn, new bug is a virus.

Any tiny little thing that people do," Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, "is going to reduce infection rates.

Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.

Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized.

A zoonosis is an animal infection that's transmissible to humans.

A reservoir host is a species that carries the pathogen, harbors it chronically, while suffering little or no illness.

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

The event of transmission, when a pathogen passes from one kind of host to another, is called spillover.

Moraleja: si eres una población próspera, que vive en altas concentraciones pero está expuesta a nuevas infecciones, es solo cuestión de tiempo hasta que llegue la próxima gran pandemia.

Around 1840, a German anatomist named Jakob Henle began to suspect the existence of noxious particles—creatures or things—that were too small to be seen with a light microscope and yet able to transmit specific diseases.

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.

Most bacteriologists were trained as medical men—Burnet himself had been, before going into bacteriological research—and "their interest in general biological problems was very limited." They cared about curing and preventing diseases, which was well and good; less so about pondering infection as a biological phenomenon, a relationship between creatures, equal in fundamental importance to such other relationships as predation, competition, and decomposition.

it may cause. Useful as they are to a virus, though, the spikes also represent points of vulnerability. They are the primary targets of immune response by an infected host. Antibodies, produced by white blood cells, are molecules that glom onto the spikes and prevent a virion from grabbing a cell.

no imagines que estos virus tienen una estrategia deliberada. No pienses que guardan una clase de responsabilidad maligna contra los seres humanos. "Se trata sólo de oportunidad", dijo. No significa que vienen por nosotros. Más bien, de una manera u otra, nosotros somos los que vamos a ellos. Les damos la oportunidad de infectarnos cuando nos metemos con sus huéspedes reservorios, cualesquiera que éstos sean.

Herpes B is a very rare infection in humans but a nasty one, with a case fatality rate of almost 70 percent among those few dozen people infected during the twentieth century (before recent breakthroughs in antiviral pharmaceutics) and almost 50 percent even since then. When