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Quotes About Infection

It was "the condition of the germ," not the character of the human population, that determined the course of the epidemic.
~ David Quammen
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.
~ David Quammen
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.
~ David Quammen
One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were euthanized as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) 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.
~ David Quammen
scrum of paramyxovirus, containing long filaments with a sort
~ David Quammen
two aspects of a virus in action: transmissibility and virulence. These
~ David Quammen
convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
~ David Quammen
No convincing biologic evidence exists for symptomatic chronic B. burgdorferi infection in patients after recommended treatment regimens for Lyme disease.
~ David Quammen
Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya, Junin, Borna, the influenzas, and the HIVs (HIV-1, which mainly accounts for the AIDS pandemic, and HIV-2, which is less widespread) are all viruses.
~ David Quammen
Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of
~ David Quammen
One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills—maybe even the cough—precede the major discharge of virus toward other people.
~ David Quammen
Thanks to evolution, our bodies have powerful ways to ward off illness and infection and enable us to live long and healthy lives. Why, then, do health costs continue to climb at unsustainable and frightening rates?
~ David Suzuki
Hiding a wound can cause a serious infection without healing. It has to be exposed and washed. Sure, the cleansing may cause pain at first—but, in the end, it brings healing, as well as relief.
~ Tessa Emily Hall, Purple Moon
Nimic nu-i mai contagios ca violen?a. Ea se ia ca tifosul ?i se încrânceneaz? în fa?a obstracolului.
~ Jean d'Ormesson
What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn't even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.
~ Jeff Vandermeer
Spanish influenza had rounded the globe in four months following its appearance in the United States and fully earned a promotion from epidemic to pandemic. It had infected so many that, for all its mildness, it had doubtlessly killed tens of thousands already. In its next wave it would kill millions.
~ Alfred W. Crosby
It was as if a virus had been injected into our school, but Macey'd known about a thousand boys before she'd come here. And I'd known Josh. The two of us had been exposed to boys before, so we had built up antibodies. We were, in a word, immune.
~ Ally Carter
They all in general had putrid gums, the spots and lassitude, with weakness of their knees.
~ James Lind
Entitlement is a contagious, insidious state of mind that has infected a whole generation of young people who feel they deserve things based on who they think they are or who their parents are. Or who they've been told they are. Entitlement also afflicts adults, who feel they should have or get things based on their friends having them or just feeling worthy. It's hard to pinpoint the derivation of where and when the disease started, but it's an epidemic.
~ Richard Kirshenbaum
The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
~ Richard Preston
You can't fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.
~ Richard Preston
In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey. Therefore, Johnson wanted the members of the expedition to wear breathing apparatus inside the cave.
~ Richard Preston
Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.
~ Richard Preston
The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.
~ Richard Preston