Quotes About Pandemics

One of my first priorities as a new member of Congress in 2019 was to visit the CDC and learn firsthand about what they needed to help protect Americans. After my visit, I learned their budget had previously been cut, and that they needed funding to modernize their data systems to help prevent pandemics and other public health crises.

Despite the name, Spanish flu struck the entire world — that's what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks.

There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.

There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.

Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare - these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.

What went all-but-unnoticed in the push for lockdowns was the fact that major public health organizations had for decades rejected them as a potential solution to epidemics.

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

Everything comes from somewhere, and strange new infectious diseases, emerging abruptly among humans, come mostly from nonhuman animals.

not just Machupo but also Marburg (1967), Lassa (1969), Ebola (1976, with Karl Johnson again prominently involved), HIV-1 (inferred in 1981, first isolated in 1983), HIV-2 (1986), Sin Nombre (1993), Hendra (1994), avian flu (1997), Nipah (1998), West Nile (1999), SARS (2003), and the much feared but anticlimactic swine flu of 2009.

Dovremmo sapere che le recenti epidemie di nuove zoonosi, oltre alla riproposizione e alla diffusione di altre già viste, fanno parte di un quadro generale più vasto, creato dal genere umano. Dovremmo renderci conto che sono conseguenze di nostre azioni, non accidenti che ci capitano tra capo e collo. Dovremmo capire che alcune situazioni da noi generate sembrano praticamente inevitabili, ma altre sono ancora controllabili.

Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly.

As a nation, we are not good at long-term planning, and no wonder: Our political system insists that every president be allowed to appoint thousands of new officials, including the kinds of officials who think about pandemics. Why is that necessary?

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it "the fatal adaptation.

Biodiversity decline can certainly be self-reinforcing, with inbuilt tipping points and deadlines: the Pike paper estimates that business-as-usual closes the 'window of opportunity to deal with pandemics' in 2041.

Some doomsayers think the collapse will be triggered by runaway government spending, excessive taxation, oppressive regulation, food shortages, fuel shortages or natural disasters such as deadly pandemics or lethal changes in the world's climate.

Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migration, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

wary of government-driven hysteria over potential pandemics as well as government agencies that have proven more beholden to corporate

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

There is a paradoxical feature of pandemics: even though they have come to be named for specific locations, they are decidedly not contained by borders.

Outbreaks are inevitable but pandemics are optional," says Larry Brilliant, the American physician who helped eradicate smallpox forty-five years ago.

I've always been interested in pandemics, where they come from, how they arise, and the key feature which really fascinates me is that the biology of the bug is the least of it.

Because pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human, it's work that takes me all around the globe - from rain forest hunting camps of central Africa to wild animal markets of east Asia.