Quotes About Pandemic

Zoonoses from wildlife represent the most significant, growing threat to global health of all EIDs

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.

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.

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.

Moraleja: si eres una población próspera, que vive en altas concentraciones pero está expuesta a nuevas infecciones, es solo cuestión de tiempo hasta que llegue la próxima gran pandemia.

From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

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.

La gente celebró el final del brote, pero los más informados lo celebraron con cautela. El SARS-CoV no se había ido, solo estaba escondido. Podía volver.

Does a virus constitute wildlife?

It was "the condition of the germ," not the character of the human population, that determined the course of the epidemic.

Three: But now the disruption of natural ecosystems seems more and more to be unloosing such microbes into a wider world.

It was the first coronavirus ever found to inflict serious illness upon humans. (Several other coronaviruses are among the many viral strains responsible for common colds. Still others cause hepatitis in mice, gastroenteritis in pigs, and respiratory infection in turkeys.) SARS-CoV has no ominous ring.

about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.

Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you're a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it's a vastly lethal pandemic.) Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?

Ebola, West Nile, Marburg, the SARS bug, monkeypox, rabies, Machupo, dengue, the yellow fever agent, Nipah, Hendra, Hantaan (the namesake of the hantaviruses, first identified in Korea), chikungunya, Junin, Borna, the influenzas, and the HIVs (HIV-1, which mainly accounts for the AIDS pandemic, and HIV-2, which is less widespread) are all viruses.

Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity.

The influenza epidemic eventually claimed more than six million lives, but in the United States, at least, it had run its course by late in the year.

At least a third of all the people in the world died.

When did the pandemic end? That is more difficult to say, for while flu pandemics often begin abruptly, they normally disappear only after several renewals of virulency and then a long tailing off. The pandemic of Spanish influenza subsided and sank below the level of general and even scientific perception in the United States and almost everywhere else in the world in spring 1919.

But the 1920 edition of the Spanish influenza virus was an attenuated variant of the original strain, and the human population was more resistent than in 1918 and 1919.

The pandemic of Spanish influenza is easier to measure if it is restricted to the years of 1918 and 1919 and its farewell performance of 1920 is excluded.

Today such news would galvanize the Medical Corps, but in 1918 it attracted only a modicum of attention.