Quotes About Microbes

One common response of ours to infection is to develop a fever. Again, we're used to considering fever as a "symptom of disease," as if it developed inevitably without serving any function. But regulation of body temperature is under our genetic control and doesn't just happen by accident. A few microbes are more sensitive to heat than our own bodies are. By raising our body temperature, we in effect try to bake the germs to death before we get baked ourselves.

That's how an Aerolineas Argentinas airplane, stopping in Lima (Peru) in 1991, managed to deliver dozens of cholera-infected people that same day to my city of Los Angeles, over 3,000 miles from Lima. The explosive increase in world travel by Americans, and in immigration to the United States, is turning us into another melting pot—this time, of microbes that we previously dismissed as just causing exotic diseases in far-off countries.

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.

Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.

Antibiotic resistance is as old as the dirt that coats our planet.

Just look at what happens to humans after they die-most of that is done by microbes.

Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior

The vast majority of terrestrial species are in fact microbes, and scientists have only begun scratching the surface of the microbial realm. It is entirely possible that examples of life as we don't know it have so far been overlooked.

They say there's microbes in a kiss, This rumor is most rife, Come, lady dear, and make of me - An invalid for life

even the most zealous vegans can weed their garden and wipe out untold millions of germs with disinfectants ("green" ones, of course) without suffering a single pang of guilt.

How can you not want to know what your parasites are talking about?

And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first injection of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being. Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch through his fourteen injections—which were only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into his skin…. And the boy went home to Alsace and never had a sign of that dreadful disease. (179–80)

He no longer has any doubt that he will pass along what the billions—trillions!—of archaea have installed within him.

Dead men may envy living mites in cheese, Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys, And subdivide, and never come to death.

let your kids experience as much microbial diversity as you can find. Get them outside, let them interact with animals, allow them to play in the dirt, rivers, streams, ocean. Don't sterilize everything they are going to touch or put into their mouth. A great example of this is the pacifier that falls on the ground. Parents who sterilize the binky run the risk of increasing the likelihood that their child will develop food sensitivities later in life.

As sworn enemies, bacteria and viruses have been duking it out for billions of years

poop pills from healthy donors to reboot our gut. Early studies show that fecal microbiota transplantation can reverse obesity, type 2 diabetes, autism, autoimmune diseases, and more.

The immune systems goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.

Bacteria keeps us from heaven and puts us there.

Desinfectam-se micróbios. Não se desinfectam espíritos...

In a 2015 TED Talk, Bill Gates asserted, "If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes

The battle lines are well drawn: the microbes' genetic simplicity and evolutionary swiftness against our intellect, creativity, and collective social and political will. We cannot overwhelm the pathogens, because they so vastly outnumber and outmaneuver us. Our survival depends on outsmarting them.

But to understand the true biologic sense of the power of microbes, we must never forget that we are the ones trying to anticipate and respond to their evolution, not the other way around.

In a 2015 TED Talk, Bill Gates asserted, "If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We're not ready for the next epidemic.