Quotes About Health

New-car smell is toxic to humans.

What's the most dangerous animal that has ever lived? Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants).

Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a Happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little better for anything else.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician father of the Supreme Court justice, was not much overstating when he declared, "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.

H1N1 virus of 1918, the virus that created its own killing fields.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.

In 2003 a new coronavirus that causes SARS, "severe acute respiratory syndrome," appeared in China and quickly spread around the world. Coronaviruses cause an estimated 15 to 30 percent of all colds and, like the influenza virus, infect epithelial cells. When the coronavirus that causes SARS does kill, it often kills through ARDS, although since the virus replicates much more slowly than influenza, death from ARDS can come several weeks after the first symptoms.)

All influenza viruses mutate constantly

Pandemics often come in waves, and the cumulative "morbidity" rate—the number of people who get sick in all the waves combined—often exceeds 50 percent.

They read the words of Colonel Philip Doane, the officer in charge of health at the country's shipyards, who told the Associated Press, "The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe.

the germ theory said that minute living organisms invaded the body, multiplied, and caused disease, and that a specific germ caused a specific disease.

most scientific rival of the germ theory explained disease in terms purely of chemistry. It saw disease as a chemical process.

In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.

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.

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 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.

Investigators today believe that in the United States the 1918–19 epidemic caused an excess death toll of about 675,000 people.

When the Washington Post asked Tom Frieden, then head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, what scared him the most, what kept him up at night, he replied, "The biggest concern is always for an influenza pandemic . . . [It] really is the worst-case scenario.

Other recommendations are generally simple and obvious: for example, keeping sick children home from school—which is standard behavior—and having sick adults stay home from work—which is not standard behavior

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

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

What could help, more than doctors, were nurses. Nursing could ease the strains on a patient, keep a patient hydrated, resting, calm, provide the best nutrition, cool the intense fevers. Nursing could give a victim of the disease the best possible chance to survive. Nursing could save lives.