Quotes About Population

amounting to .2 percent of the world's population. Although Jews have been around for thousands of years, they have the same number of members as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), which was founded in the nineteenth century. Their survival may well be impressive, but the fact that they have so few members

explanation. Why didn't they accumulate a much larger population?

Some bacteria are more or less permanent residents; they form long-lasting colonies.

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.

Another implication was that epidemics don't end because all the susceptible individuals are either dead or recovered. They end because susceptible individuals are no longer sufficiently dense within the population.

if superspreaders exist and can be identified during a disease outbreak, then control measures should be targeted at isolating those individuals, rather than applied more broadly and diffusely across an entire population.

If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus," the historian William H. McNeill has noted, "or even a bacterium—we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the very recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.

Once a species of insect or bird has reached a new island and established a population, evolution toward gigantism does offer certain advantages: fat storage, thermal stability, and defense against predators, if there are any. But gigantism is also a way of becoming flightless, and flightlessness is a way of becoming marooned.

The more numerous we become, the more crowded, the more interconnected, the more demanding of resources, the more invasive of wild places, the more disruptive of richly diverse ecosystems—the closer we stand to the epidemic threshold for any new virus that probes us as a possible route to greater evolutionary success.

As long as H5N1 is out there in the world," Webster said, "there is the possibility of disaster. That's really the bottom line with H5N1. So long as it's out there in the human population, there is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human." He paused. "And then God help us.

R0 = ?N/(? + b + v)

Wilson came up with this: "When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.

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.

Another way to comprehend it is this: From the time of our beginning as a species (about 200,000 years ago) until the year 1804, human population rose to a billion; between 1804 and 1927, it rose by another billion; we reached 3 billion in 1960; and each net addition of a billion people, since then, has taken only about thirteen years. In October 2011, we came to the 7-billion mark

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.

Never mind the recovered and immune members of the population; they just represented padding and interference so far as disease propagation was concerned. Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected.

It was "the condition of the germ," not the character of the human population, that determined the course of the epidemic.

Habitat doesn't replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.

In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.

After all the fertile land in the immediate neighbourhood of the first settlers were cultivated, if capital and population increased, more food would be required, and it could only be procured from land not so advantageously situated.

Vilfredo Pareto's original study in 1906 found that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

Also, in global wealth distribution, less than 10% of the world's population controls more than 90% of the world's assets, varying from country to country. Even in our daily work lives, 20% of all actions we do contribute to 80% of our daily results. Richard

But there is one fact which does emerge from human history with unvarying insistence, and it is a fact which is fatal to the Malthus-Darwin theory: that the natural rate of human increase is repressed the more, not where the misery due to famine, war, and pestilence falls more heavily, but precisely where it falls more lightly.

If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.