Quotes About Health

the temperature at which various kinds of bacteria died and the power of different disinfectants to kill them. That information allowed the creation of antiseptic conditions in both laboratory and public health work.

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.

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.

In fact, the virus can remain infectious on a hard surface for days.)

San Antonio suffered one of the highest attack rates but lowest death rates in the country; the virus there infected 53.5 percent of the population, and 98 percent of all homes in the city had at least one person sick with influenza. But there the virus had mutated toward mildness; only 0.8 percent of those who got influenza died. (This death rate was still double that of normal influenza.)

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.

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.

Throughout known history there have been periodic pandemics of influenza, usually several a century. They erupt when a new influenza virus emerges. And the nature of the influenza virus makes it inevitable that new viruses emerge.

Influenza causes pneumonia either directly, by a massive viral invasion of the lungs, or indirectly—and more commonly—by destroying certain parts of the body's defenses and allowing so-called secondary invaders, bacteria, to infest the lungs virtually unopposed.

They knew so little. So little. They knew only that isolation worked. The New York State Training School for Girls had quarantined itself, even requiring people delivering supplies to leave them outside. It had had no cases.

After it defeats an infection, specialized white cells (called "memory T cells") and antibodies that bind to the antigen remain in the body. If any invader carrying the same antigen attacks again, the immune system responds far more quickly than the first time. When the immune system can respond so quickly that a new infection will not even cause symptoms, people become immune to the disease.

In 1753 James Lind conducted a pioneering controlled experiment among British sailors and demonstrated that scurvy could be prevented by eating limes—ever since, the British have been called "limeys.

Yet men could appear healthy while incubating influenza themselves, and they could also infect others before symptoms appeared.

finally fade away in both the United States and the world. It did not disappear.

helped lead to a new conception of disease as something with an identity of its own, an objective existence.

This disease is no joke, to be made light of, but a terrible calamity pg 36

The Board of Health pleaded for help from retired nurses and doctors if they remembered "even a little" of their profession.

In China the wind was originally regarded as a demon that caused illness

I believe we all agree that, for the health of Kansas, nothing is more important than education.

Obesity is a prison; in the US we spend more to treat type 2 diabetes each year than is spent on education.

We have to redesign the finances of the Quebec state to preserve what counts: education, health and families.

What is lacking in India are decent social services. The health service is a disaster. Education is a disaster.

Our breathing reflects every emotional or physical effort and every disturbance.