Quotes About Disease

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.

No nos equivoquemos: estos brotes de enfermedad que se suceden uno tras otro están relacionados entre sí. Y no solo nos ocurren; constituyen las consecuencias imprevistas de todo aquello que hacemos.

Zoonoses from wildlife represent the most significant, growing threat to global health of all EIDs

Zoonotic pathogens can hide. That's what makes them so interesting, so complicated, and so problematic.

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

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

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.

INFECTIOUS DISEASE IS all around us. Infectious disease is a kind of natural mortar binding one creature to another, one species to another, within the elaborate biophysical edifices we call ecosystems.

And here's the thing about outbreaks: They end. In some cases they end after many years, in other cases they end rather soon.

Emergence and spillover are distinct concepts but interconnected. "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. Hendra virus spilled over into Drama Series (from bats) and then into Vic Rail (from horses) in September 1994. Emergence is a process, a trend.

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.

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.

SIR model, representing a flow of individuals, during the course of an outbreak, through those three classes I mentioned earlier: from susceptible (S) to infected (I) to recovered (R). Anderson

A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers.

equatorial Africa? Could it have arrived there in one soaring leap, leaving no traces in between? From southwestern Sudan to Manila is almost seven thousand miles as the bat flies. But no bat can fly that far without roosting. Are ebolaviruses more broadly distributed than we suspect? Should scientists start looking for them in India, Thailand, and Vietnam? Or did Reston virus get to the Philippines the same way Taï Forest virus got to Switzerland and Johannesburg—by airplane? If

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

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

The significance of the concept, Lloyd-Smith and his coauthors noted, is that 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. Conversely, if you quarantine forty-nine infectious patients but miss one, and that one is a superspreader, your control efforts have failed and you face an epidemic.

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.

One of the signal lessons of Lyme disease, as Rick Ostfeld and his colleagues have shown, is that a zoonosis may spill over more readily within a disrupted, fragmented ecosystem than within an intact, diverse ecosystem.

Dovremmo sapere che le recenti epidemie di nuove zoonosi, oltre alla riproposizione e alla diffusione di altre già viste, fanno parte di un quadro generale più vasto, creato dal genere umano. Dovremmo renderci conto che sono conseguenze di nostre azioni, non accidenti che ci capitano tra capo e collo. Dovremmo capire che alcune situazioni da noi generate sembrano praticamente inevitabili, ma altre sono ancora controllabili.

Desde luego, todo tiene un origen; y, dado que los seres humanos somos un primate relativamente nuevo, ha resultado lógico suponer que nuestras enfermedades infecciosas más antiguas han llegado a nosotros - transformadas, al menor ligeramente, por la evolución- procedentes de otros huéspedes animales.