Epidemics Quotes

“It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“In times of stress and danger such as come about as the result of an epidemic, many tragic and cruel phases of human nature are brought out, as well as many brave and unselfish ones.”
― William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama

“Transparency is critical in public health and epidemics; laypeople become either effective force-multipliers or stubborn walls.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“My dear Gorgas,
Instead of being simply satisfied to make friends and draw your pay, it is worth doing your duty, to the best of your ability, for duty’s sake; and in doing this, while the indolent sleep, you may accomplish something that will be of real value to humanity.
Your good friend, Reed
Dr. Walter Reed encouraging Dr. William Gorgas who went on to make history eradicating Yellow Fever in Havana, 1902 and Panama, 1906, liberating the entire North American continent from centuries of Yellow Fever epidemics.”
― William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama

“How to spellAedes aegypti,the world's one-stop, viral-disease-transmitting mosquito: T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Incredibly, just one mosquito species,Aedes aegyptiis responsible for the spread of four known different deadly viral diseases to human beings, yet this mosquito has been allowed to infest densely-populated urban centers.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“Havana, Cuba, in which city yellow fever had not failed to make its yearly appearance during the past one hundred and forty years... Havana was freed from yellow fever within ninety days.Dr. Walter Reed, 1902”
― Walter Reed

“In one respect New Orleans has set an example for all the world in the fight against yellow fever. The first impression was the complete organization of the citizens and the rational and reasonable way in which the fight has been conducted by them. With a tangible enemy in view, the army of defense could begin to fight rationally and scientifically. The... spirit in which the citizens of New Orleans sallied forth to win this fight strikes one who has been witness to the profound gloom, distress, and woe that cloud every other epidemic city.Rupert Boyce, Dean of Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases, 1905”
― Rupert Boyce

“Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.”
― Steven Johnson

“The use of vaccine in the control of yellow fever should occupy more or less the same place that typhoid fever vaccine has in the control of typhoid fever. No sanitary authority would desire to substitute typhoid vaccine for the supply of pure water and food, so we must not accept the yellow fever vaccine as a substitute for the elimination of Aedes aegypti. The vaccine provides individual protection for the person who cannot be protected by more general measures.”
― Fred Lowe Soper

“Raising awareness versus raising alarm;
the public can't be better informed if the information isn't better.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“The history of epidemics in human populations has always been closely connected to cities. From the Great Plague of Athens (430 BC) to the COVID-19 pandemic, cities have played a unique role in the lives of epidemics that affect human populations. The increased population density provides the pathogen with a vastly increased likelihood that during a given infectious period, an infected individual will make contact with a susceptible individual. Overcrowding and urban poverty also directly affect other epidemic processes, e.g. attracting vectors who thrive on the byproducts of urban human existence.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“There is a kinship, between the climate scientists and the epidemiologists and the scholars of authoritarian states. The people who research worst-case scenarios are stuck breaking bad news while protectors of profit margins and purveyors of institutionalist mythologies market false assurances. The later remain successful not in spite of evidence, buttospite the evidence.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

“Eradicating mosquitoes is a means to an end. An uninfected mosquito is harmless to humans - just a nuisance. An infected mosquito is a danger.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“[From Spillover- Zika, Ebola, and Beyond, 2016] - Lina Moses, Epidemiologist, Sierra Leone

One of the tragedies of Ebola is that it spreads through LOVE and through people taking care of who they care about. Once people start to understand how its transmitted, they learn that they can't take care of the people that they love, and that's how the disease slows down and stops.”
― Lina Moses

“Having a child has become a prodigiously artificial thing. It no longer has anything of the passionately accidental event about it; it has become the parthenogenetic fruit of a calculation of biological, dietary and psychosocial data and you wonder to what extent dream, desire or fatality are still involved. But perhaps the race is losing its interest in sexuality, preferring instead a sort of protozoan transplantation. Leaving out of account that what has been conceived by artificial insemination is very likely to continue its life in artificial intelligence and to die of built-in obsolescence. After the mechanical bride, the mechanical widow. Now every human being is the product of a sexual act, a sexual pact or else we should not be the human race. It takes a sexual copulation successfully to produce a human being, just as, among the Hindus, it takes a copulation between the word and silence for a sacrifice to be successfully carried out.

In a sense the child is indeed the continuation of the species. But in another, he or she is a biological vestige of it. The further we go with change, genetic innovations and fashion, the more unreal it becomes, with each new generation, to put our trust in the processes of childbirth and organic growth. The simplicity and slowness of those things are entirely outside the range of our contemporary experience.

How can we claim to exercise judgement if we have lost a sense of punishment? How can we claim to judge anything at all if we no longer accept being judged? And if we are no longer able either to judge or be judged, then we lose all hope of being absolved or condemned in the past or the future. Now, what can no longer be reflected in the past or the future takes place in a single instant with all its consequences. The Last Judgement becomes an immediate reality. We have right here before us the unchecked proliferation in epidemic proportions of all processes, the multiplication of all cancers on an epidemic scale.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“This hegemonic simulation, a configuration that seems triumphant and unyielding, has its reverse, its revulsive effects. By virtually yielding to this global dynamic and exaggerating it in several ways, all of these would-be emerging countries gradually become submerging instead. They slowly invade the Western sphere, not on a competitive level, but like a ground swell.
This invasion occurs in many ways, like a viral infiltration. It is the problem of global, more or less clandestine immigration (Hispanics are literally cannibalizing the United States). But also in the contemporary forms of terror, a true filterable virus, made up of terrorism and counterterrorism, and which is a violent abreaction to global domination, destabilizing it from the inside. The global order is cannibalized by terror.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power

“Studies show that epidemics caused by viruses began when the human lifestyle changed from hunter-gatherer to agriculture over eleven thousand years ago. Due to a newfound ability to live in one place, humans began investing energy into their homes and land — activities that required many people to work in close proximity to each other.”
― Donna Maltz, Conscious Cures: Soulutions to 21st Century Pandemics

“If the masks actually work, don't you think maybe there wouldn't be an epidemic?”
― Ling Ma, Severance

“To those in charge of responding to an epidemic, from disaster management professionals through hospitals to governmental authorities, it is not merely the overall number of cases over the epidemic's lifetime that matters, but also how that number is distributed over time. Rapid epidemic spikes can overwhelm healthcare capacities and cause excess mortality from lack of care, both among the victims of the epidemic and from unaffected individuals who cannot avail themselves of adequate care due to acute overload of the hospital system. For this reason, we are interested in the maxima that we have explored previously.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“Mary Mallon was born in 1869 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, then part of British-ruled Ireland. Like many of her countrymen, she immigrated to the United States at a young age, where she eventually found employment as a cook. During her lifetime, it was suspected that she has unintentionally (albeit perhaps negligently) infected over fifty people with typhoid.

Typhoid fever is a bacterial disease caused by gastrointestinal infection by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi. In most patients, it causes an unpleasant but manageable disease that resolves fully. However, as many as one in twenty patients become chronic carriers, who continue to be infectious for their lifetimes. Mary Mallon was one of the unfortunate few who fell into that category. It is hypothesised today that she contracted typhoid at birth.

Her case, which involved prolonged quarantine on North Brother Island for almost half her life, raises complex moral and ethical questions about reconciling the interests of public health with the moral imperative to respect individual liberties and treat the sick (even if asymptomatic) with compassion.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“There is an unhelpful tendency to regard superspreaders – and events where superspreading has occurred – as anomalies out of the ordinary. This contributes relatively little to our understanding of infectious dynamics and is bound to exacerbate the stigmatisation of individuals, as it has e.g. during the early years of AIDS, when much sensationalistic and unjustified blame was laid at the feet of early HIV patient Gaetan Dugas (on which see McKay, 2014). Rather, superspreading is one 'tail' of a distribution prominent mainly because it is noticeable – statistical models predict that there are generally an equal number of 'greatly inferior spreaders' who are particularly ineffective in spreading the illness.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“Computational models of infectious disease can make all the difference in our response to pandemics. As habitat loss and climate change make zoonotic spillover events increasingly more likely, COVID-19 is almost certainly not the last major pandemic of the 21st century.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“There's not a lot of value in preparing for a war, because what happens in a war is unpredictable. But there is a lot of value in preparing for an outbreak, because what happens in an outbreak is predictable. Let's be prepared, not scared.”
― Richard Preston, Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

“This is an infectious disease, Conant began. The CDC case-control study may offer some definitive word on how it was spread, but that research was stalled, probably for lack of resources. We are losing time, and time is the enemy in any epidemic. The disease is moving even if the government isn’t.”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

“Se pensarmos na Europa Oriental e na Ocidental como corpos-organismos distintos, o Deméter poderia ser então o vetor que carrega o patógeno-vampiro e o introduz no corpo deste novo hospedeiro suscetível, sem qualquer imunidade.
Nem mesmo o vetor, entretanto, resiste à virulência do patógeno; ele próprio sucumbe à doença que inocularia, funcionando também como uma espécie de microcosmo do que poderia vir a acontecer caso o vampiro obtivesse sucesso em sua replicação: um cenário de desastre apocalíptico.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Se o corpo físico do vampiro pode ter sido extirpado, ele mantém-se presente e vivo em sua inoculação da realização vívida de que suas fantasias fazem parte de nós, residindo como um vírus latente, incurável, que apenas aguarda uma baixa de imunidade para que possa reemergir.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“É possível verificar que conforme a doença-vampirismo se espalha pela narrativa, ela progressivamente a contamina com um discurso viral, que acaba permeando toda a ação: as pessoas se sentem “doentes”, “um lixo”, mas “deve ser só gripe”; se Mike está doente, “alguns acham que ele pegou alguma doença do Danny Glick”; quando a mãe de Danny Glick começa a ter sonhos estranhos com o filho morto, seu marido nota como “ela estava pálida [...] os lábios haviam perdido a cor natural, e ela ganhara olheiras escuras”; se a Casa Marsten fede, o odor “lembrava lágrimas, vômito e trevas”; se a indústria dos trailers cresce, ela cresce “como uma epidemia”; se o medo de uma doença indizível se espalha, “fantasias paranoicas podem ser contagiosas”; se o vampiro logra atacar-me, “não encosta em mim, fui contaminado”.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Quammem afirma que vírus transmitidos pelo sangue precisam, em geral, de um vetor - frequentemente um inseto hematófago; aqui, uma capillaria — que deve “chegar em busca de uma refeição”: fica estabelecida uma intencionalidade.
Tal como o inseto, o próprio verme é atraído pelo sangue humano, ampliando assim as condições possíveis de transmissão da síndrome vampiresca. Os resultados desse quadro de alta transmissibilidade e infectividade são imediatos, logo começando a ser sentidos sob a superfície da cidade.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas