Quotes About Disease

Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.

The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

This was a Third World disease attacking First World people. The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads into the First. This is the future trajectory of disease on planet Earth.

Shortly after Dave was diagnosed with leish, Tom Weinberg learned from the CDC that he, too, had the disease. Chris Fisher, Mark Adams, and Juan Carlos Fernández went to the NIH and were also diagnosed with it. All were treated except Juan Carlos; Dr. Nash recognized that his immune system appeared to be fighting it off and decided to delay treatment. It was the right decision, and Juan Carlos ended up leish-free without going through the rigors of amphotericin B.

The ability to have sex gives leishmania a tremendous evolutionary advantage. It is the main reason it has thrived and spread for a hundred million years, infecting dinosaurs and people, becoming one of the most successful diseases (from its own point of view) in the world.

Many of the Spanish by this time had fallen sick, and quite a few had died, due to the unsanitary conditions on board ship and the impossibility of escaping contagion. In a few years, fully half of Columbus's fifteen hundred soldiers would be dead of disease.

Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to afflict the human race.

Ten years after smallpox, another dreadful pandemic swept the New World: measles. This we know ravaged Honduras with exceptional cruelty. For Europeans, measles is a far milder disease than smallpox; although easily spread, it rarely kills. But when it reached the New World it proved to be almost as deadly, killing at least 25 percent of the affected population.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, told our team bluntly that, by going into the jungle and getting leishmaniasis, "You got a really cold jolt of what it's like for the bottom billion people on earth.

It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world's first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the "empire on which the sun never sets," so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infected blankets. And millions more Indians died of disease who might have survived, had European brutality not left them weakened and susceptible.

Leishmaniasis has a long and terrible history with human beings, stretching back as far as human records exist and causing suffering and death for thousands of years.

Perhaps the ghastliest disease endemic to mosquitia is Mucocutaneous Leishmaniasis, sometimes called white leprosy, caused by the bite of an infected sand fly. The Leishmania parasite migrates to the mucus membranes of the victim's nose and lips and eats them away, eventually creating a giant, weeping sore where the face used to be.

In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in only one direction?* The answer lies in how the lives of Old World and New World people diverged after that cross-continental migration more than fifteen thousand years ago.

For the poison of hatred seated near the heart doubles the burden for the one who suffers the disease he is burdened with his own sorrow, and groans on seeing another's happiness.

Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease.

Your organs are all failing, but your cancer...well, your cancer is doing great.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

ANGER IS A DESTRUCTIVE soul-trait. Just as scurvy is a disease of the body, so is anger a disease of the soul. —ORCHOT TZADDIKIM (1540)

There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

It's a disease of critics that once they've labeled someone, it's very hard to change their perspective. It's laziness.

I've seen phenomenal work in Leicester where people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease use telecare to measure their own oxygen levels, and if they need to change their meds they get a phonecall from a nurse who has seen the results of their readings.

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.