Quotes About Viruses

If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.

At least etymologically speaking, when we talk about influenza we are talking about the influences that shape the world everywhere at once. Today's bird flu or swine flu viruses or the 1918 Spanish flu virus are not the real influenza — not the underlying influence — but only its symptom.

The modern diet is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived immunity-building compounds which makes us highly vulnerable to viruses, infections and disease.

stressful year after year? One reason is the ever-evolving army of mind viruses, taking over a greater and greater

Dan Quayle, mutating the memes in the United Negro College Fund's motto, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." There is some good news in this book. So before I get into how mind viruses are spreading wildly throughout the world—infecting people with unwanted programming like the Michelangelo computer virus infects computers with self-destruct instructions—I'll start with the good news. . . .

For the first time in history, we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real-time... Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour.

In a culture fueled by burnout, a culture that has run itself down, our national resilience becomes compromised. And when our collective immune system is weakened, we become more susceptible to viruses that are part of every culture because they're part of human nature - fear-mongering, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery.

Have you ever wondered why life seems so complicated today--more complicated and stressful year after year? One reason is the ever-evolving army of mind viruses, taking over a greater and greater portion of your mind, diverting you from your pursuit of happiness and due to have an even greater effect on the next generation.

All naturally evolved religions--cultural viruses--are bundles of memes.

Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guanarito. VEE. Monkeypox. Dengue. Chikungunya. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Junin. The rabieslike strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus.

Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects. Viruses are nature's crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry.

Frederick A. Murphy, a virologist who had helped to identify Marburg virus. He was and is one of the world's leading electron-microscope photographers of viruses. (His photographs of viruses have been exhibited in art museums.)

Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: "Viruses of each species have genomes that are at least 30–40% divergent from one another, a level of diversity that presumably reflects differences in the ecologic niche they occupy and in their evolutionary history.

Charlie Calisher and his coauthors, besides touching on broad principles, discussed a handful of bat-related viruses in detail: Nipah, Hendra, rabies and its close relatives (the lyssaviruses), SARS-CoV, and a couple of others.

Viruses couldn't be viewed with an optical microscope; they couldn't be grown in a culture of chemical nutrients; they couldn't be captured, as bacteria could, with a porcelain filter. They could only be inferred.

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.

no imagines que estos virus tienen una estrategia deliberada. No pienses que guardan una clase de responsabilidad maligna contra los seres humanos. "Se trata sólo de oportunidad", dijo. No significa que vienen por nosotros. Más bien, de una manera u otra, nosotros somos los que vamos a ellos. Les damos la oportunidad de infectarnos cuando nos metemos con sus huéspedes reservorios, cualesquiera que éstos sean.

But what is it about bats? I asked. Why do so many of these zoonotic viruses—or what seems like so many—spill over onto humans from the chiropteran order of mammals? Or is that the wrong question? "It is the right question," he said. "But I don't think there's a good answer for it yet.

Bats come in many, many forms. The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat. Such diversity might suggest that bats don't harbor more than their share of viruses; it could be, instead, that their viral burden is proportional to their share of all mammal diversity, and thus just seems surprisingly large.

Two: Those millions of unknown creatures include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists, and other organisms, many of which are parasitic.

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.

Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out. Nearly all zoonotic diseases result from infection by one of six kinds of pathogen: viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists (a group of

Some of these viruses," he warned, citing coronaviruses in particular, "should be considered as serious threats to human health. These are viruses with high evolvability and proven ability to cause epidemics in animal populations.