Quotes About Disease

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused

modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. . . They are in a particular panic over things they can't even see--germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. . . Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusion--a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages.

Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.

One of the big challenges in studying aging is this: Aging isn't a disease that has an end point. Ultimately, death is the end point, but aging is really a cluster of diseases, processes, conditions, and system errors that result in loss of years and loss of quality of life.

It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too. (4)

If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86)

My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.

It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease.

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system

From there she moved naturally enough to the Centers for Disease Control, where she led a team seeking answers to basic questions about the overall health of the population. For instance, blood lead levels in children fell by a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s. This welcome development, they figured out, was due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline.

That's what you do in TB control," Charity said. "The nurses take them to a hotel room and the sheriff watches them. If you think you have a shot at containing it, that's what you do. You have to do it by health officer authority. People say you can't do it, but we do it every day for TB.

Each of the crude strategies had some slight effect, but none by itself made much of a dent, and certainly none had the ability to halt the pandemic by driving the disease's reproductive rate below 1. One intervention was not like the others, however: when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff.

Everyone could see that kids played a role in disease transmission. No one imagined they would have the effect that they had in the Glasses' model.

No single intervention would stop a flu-like disease in its tracks, just as no single safety measure would prevent a doctor from replacing the right hip when it was the left hip that hurt. The trick was to mix and match strategies in response to the nature of the disease and the behavior of the population. Each strategy was like another slice of Swiss cheese; enough slices, properly aligned, would hide the holes.

The aisle was narrower than a normal bus; paramedics knew not to bring a normal-sized stretcher onto a school bus, he later learned, because it wouldn't fit down the aisle. "I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system," he said after his visit.

The paper analyzed the effects of that inability, and showed that American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease. American cities that didn't did not.

There was the CDC way of doing things," she said. "It was vaccinate and isolate. And this wasn't that.

They really should just change the name," she said. "It shouldn't be the Centers for Disease Control. It should be the Centers for Disease Observation and Reporting. That's what they do well.

asked myself, Why didn't these epidemiologists figure it out? They didn't figure it out because they didn't have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious disease without the purpose of trying to stop it.

Nineteen eighteen, said Carter. What happened then? asked Obama. Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system," he said after his visit.

Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.