Quotes About Microbe

Man is a creature composed of countless millions of cells: a microbe is composed of only one, yet throughout the ages the two have been in ceaseless conflict.

I wish, I wish I were a poisonous bacterium.

This genetic resistance, by the way, should not be confused with acquired immunity. Acquired immunity is when a body gets rid of a pathogen and afterward maintains a state of high alert for that same microbe. It's why people don't normally get the same illness twice. Genetic resistance is something deeper and more mysterious. It is not acquired through exposure—you are born with it.

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct.

There's no reason to assume that AIDS will stand unique, in our time, as the only such global disaster caused by a strange microbe emerging from some other animal. 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.)

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct. I

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.

I am imprudent, I am sick, I have a soul, I am a microbe. But isn't blooming a sickness? Doesn't it hurt when a bud splits open?

The Microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all, But many sanguine people hope To see him through a microscope.

A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ - but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone - look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.

At best, Henry had only slowed an inevitable, history-shaping pandemic. Governments would fall. Economies would collapse. Wars would arise. Why did we think that our own modern era was immune to the assault of humanity's most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?

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.

Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?

The Microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all, But many sanguine people hope To see him through a microscope.

They could see this dance of subjectivities because they cultivated the plant's-eye view, the animal's-eye view, the microbe's-eye view, and the fungus's-eye view—perspectives that depend as much on imagination as observation.

When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an immune response, both an antibody response and a cellular response, to ultimately contain the microbe.

It is sometimes as dangerous to be run into by a microbe as by a trolley car.

Inflammation as understood in man and the higher animals is a phenomenon that almost always results from the intervention of some pathogenic microbe.

Man is the weak being who, in spite of all his self-importance and pride of wealth and capital, is vanquished by the smallest microbe.

HOUSE, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe.

As it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two to make a disease, the microbe and its host.

Since the development of bacteriology, many have been inclined to forget that, as it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two to make a disease, the microbe and its host. There is a constant struggle between disease germs and the bodies of animals and of human beings that they invade. There is also a tendency for an equilibrium to become established. The germs kill off the most susceptible and immunize the more resistant.

Against other illnesses, though—including measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, and the now defeated smallpox—our antibodies stimulated by one infection confer lifelong immunity. That's the principle of vaccination: to stimulate our antibody production without our having to go through the actual experience of the disease, by inoculating us with a dead or weakened strain of microbe.

In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.