Quotes About Disease

virus has only one function: to replicate itself.

The postulates state that before a microorganism can be said to cause a given disease, first, investigators had to find the germ in every case of the disease; second, they had to isolate the germ in pure culture; third, they had to inoculate a susceptible animal with the germ and the animal then had to get the disease; and, fourth, the germ had to be isolated from the test animal. Koch's postulates

Disease began to be seen as something that invaded solid parts of the body, as an independent entity, instead of being a derangement of the blood. This was a fundamental first step in what would become a revolution.

The study of epidemic disease is, of course, a prime focus of public health.

And West Nile will never be a major threat; it is not a disease that will ever explode through the human population. Yet it was receiving more research dollars than influenza.

During the course of the epidemic, 47 percent of all deaths in the United States, nearly half of all those who died from all causes combined—from cancer, from heart disease, from stroke, from tuberculosis, from accidents, from suicide, from murder, and from all other causes—resulted from influenza and its complications. And it killed enough to depress the average life expectancy in the United States by more than ten years.

Quinine worked on one disease: malaria. Many physicians gave it for influenza with no better reasoning than desperation.

But two days later, six hundred men were hospitalized with this strange disease. The hospital ran out of empty beds, and hospital staff began falling ill.

AN INFECTION is an act of violence; it is an invasion, a rape, and the body reacts violently.

an epidemic so extreme that New York City had required people to obtain passes to travel.

NATURE CHOSE to rage in 1918, and it chose the form of the influenza virus in which to do

But as horrific as the disease itself was, public officials and the media helped create that terror—not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure.

There are three different types of influenza viruses: A, B, and C. Type C rarely causes disease in humans. Type B does cause disease, but not epidemics. Only influenza A viruses cause epidemics or pandemics, an epidemic being a local or national outbreak, a pandemic a worldwide one.

Throughout the wars in history more soldiers had often died of disease than in battle or of their wounds. And epidemic disease had routinely spread from armies to civilian populations.

Miner had seen influenza often. He diagnosed the disease as influenza. But he had never seen influenza like this. This was violent, rapid in its progress through the body, and sometimes lethal. This influenza killed. Soon dozens of his patients—the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county—were being struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot.

it can infect someone else for anywhere from an hour to a day after it is exhaled (the lower the humidity, the longer the virus survives). But they did know that it was "a crowd disease," spread most easily in crowds.

Influenza could not have been contained as SARS was—influenza is far more contagious.

Royal Copeland, head of the New York City health department, and the port health officer jointly stated there was "not the slightest danger of an epidemic" because the disease seldom attacks "a well-nourished people." (Even had he been right, a study by his own health department had just concluded that 20 percent of city schoolchildren were malnourished.) He took no action whatsoever to prevent the spread of infection.

But the virus, even as it lost some of its virulence, was not yet finished. Only weeks after the disease seemed to have dissipated, when town after town had congratulated itself on surviving it—and in some places where people had had the hubris to believe they had defeated it—after health boards and emergency councils had canceled orders to close theaters, schools, and churches and to wear masks, a third wave broke over the earth.

Mexico spent $180 million to fight the disease, but suffered $9 billion in economic losses because of the irrational response from trading partners—not exactly positive reinforcement if the goal is to encourage candor the next time.

Antigen drift can create epidemics. One study found nineteen discrete, identifiable epidemics in the United States in a thirty-three-year period—more than one every other year. Each one caused between ten thousand and forty thousand "excess deaths" in the United States alone—an excess over and above the death toll usually caused by the disease. As a result influenza kills more people in the United States than any other infectious disease, including AIDS.

Katherine Anne Porter was a reporter then, on the Rocky Mountain News. Her fiancé, a young officer, died. He caught the disease nursing her, and she, too, was expected to die. Her colleagues set her obituary in type. She lived. In "Pale Horse, Pale Rider

It now seemed as if there had never been life before the epidemic. The disease informed every action of every person in the city.

in 1835 Harvard's Jacob Bigelow had argued in a major address that in "the unbiased opinion of most medical men of sound judgment and long experience . . . the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less, if all disease were left to itself.