Quotes About Virus

Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.

I think the virus is present all the time, within reservoir species," he told me. "And sometimes there is transmission from reservoir species to other species.

If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus," the historian William H. McNeill has noted, "or even a bacterium—we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the very recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.

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.

The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

Now here's the part that, as it percolates into your brain, should cause a shudder: Scientists think that each of those twelve groups (eight of HIV-2, four of HIV-1) reflects an independent instance of cross-species transmission. Twelve spillovers.

Their sampling showed that this SARS-like virus was especially prevalent in several bats belonging to the genus Rhinolophus, known commonly as horseshoe bats.

Estará la próxima gran pandemia causada por un virus? ¿Saldrá de un bosque tropical o de un mercado en el sur de China? ¿Matará a treinta o cuarenta millones de personas?

It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is (1) extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality though a relatively low number of cases, and yet (2) poorly transmissible, so far, from human to human. It'll kill you if you catch it, very likely, but you're unlikely to catch it except

Invadimos los bosques tropicales y otros espacios salvajes, que albergan una enorme cantidad de especies de animales y plantas; y en el seno de estas criaturas, multitud de virus desconocidos. Talamos árboles; matamos animales o los enjaulamos para enviarlos a los mercados. Alteramos ecosistemas y provocamos que los virus escapen de sus huéspedes naturales. Cuando esto ocurre, los virus necesitan un nuevo huésped. A menudo, ese huésped somos nosotros.

The protein wrap is known as a capsid. The

A zoonosis is an animal infection that's transmissible to humans.

The basic point is so important I'll repeat it: RNA viruses mutate profligately.

The chimpanzee seems to have been the index case for infecting 18 primary human cases," they wrote.

Even the influenza virus of 1918–1919, having killed up to 50 million people around the world, remained a ghostly cipher, unseen and unidentified at the time.

With our virus, people like to say, they'll say, 'Oh, you study that virus that causes the insect to explode!' Like, the virus doesn't cause the insect to explode," he insisted. "It causes it to melt.

If we can't predict a forthcoming influenza pandemic or any other newly emergent virus, we can at least be vigilant; we can be well-prepared and quick to respond; we can be ingenious and scientifically sophisticated in the forms of our response.

Laboratory virologists are not generally knockabout people. You don't meet them in bars, waving their arms and bragging lustily about the perils of their métier. They tend to be focused, neat, and still, like nuclear engineers.

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

it may cause. Useful as they are to a virus, though, the spikes also represent points of vulnerability. They are the primary targets of immune response by an infected host. Antibodies, produced by white blood cells, are molecules that glom onto the spikes and prevent a virion from grabbing a cell.

What was causing this mayhem? How was it spreading from one horse to another, or anyway getting into so many of them simultaneously? One possibility was a toxic contaminant in the feed supply. Or maybe poison, maliciously introduced. Alternatively, Reid began wondering whether there might be an exotic virus at work, such as the one responsible for African horse sickness (AHS), a disease carried by biting midges in sub-Saharan Africa.

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

the good news about Reston virus, derived both from the 1989 US scare and from retrospective research on Luzon, is that it doesn't seem to cause illness in humans, only in monkeys. The bad news is that no one understands why. Apart

Does a virus constitute wildlife?