Infectious Diseases Quotes

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

The scientific community should work as hard as possible to address major issues that affect our everyday lives such as climate change, infectious diseases and counterterrorism; in particular, 'clean energy' research deserves far higher priority. And science and technology are the prime routes to tackling these issues. ~ Martin Rees

We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men. ~ Hans Zinsser

Hospitals in almost every country have reported outbreaks of C. diff, and the number and severity of cases continues to soar. In 2010 there were 350,000 cases of C. diff diagnosed in U.S. hospitals. That means that of 1,000 patients admitted to U.S hospitals, 10 will become infected with C. diff, most of them elderly. In some hospitals and nursing homes, as many as one in five patients is infected. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

The worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government. The Border Patrol knows this. Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border. ~ Donald Trump

With you I'm jealous of what is obscure, unconscious, of something in which explanations are unthinkable, of something that cannot be puzzled out. I'm jealous of your toilet things, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the infectious diseases borne on the air, which may affect you and poison your blood. ~ Boris Pasternak

The idea behind a stool transplant is to "reseed the lawn," so to speak. After exposure to weeks or months of antibiotics (including Vanco) the normal bowel flora - the organisms in your colon that help prevent infection - is weakened. They simply can't keep C. diff out. In other words, the normal barrier function of the colonic flora is gone, and C. diff gets right back in. So putting in some normal flora from a healthy donor is like reseeding the lawn - it restores the barrier. When that happens, C. diff cannot get back in, and the infection is cured. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

Some older or very ill patients may not be suitable candidates for fecal transfer. Colonoscopy is an invasive procedure, especially for those patients who are too ill with other conditions like cancer, heart failure, dialysis, or Alzheimer's. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease. ~ Brenda Wilmoth Lerner

Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders. ~ Karen Armstrong

Fasting puts undue stress on your heart by cannibalizing your cardiac muscle for fuel. That's right; it eats away at your heart muscles causing damage and a risk of heart failure. Water fasting also creates a risk of heart failure due to the lack of minerals in your diet. Potassium and Magnesium are especially necessary for cardiac function and you cannot get these through water alone. During the 1950s and 60s, fasting was used experimentally as a way to treat obesity. It had fatal consequences with several patients dying from heart failure. Your heart isn't the only thing at risk from fasting. Your immune system becomes compromised, putting you more at risk of infectious diseases that your weakened body may not have the energy to fight. Other less serious side effects include: mood swings, general irritability, low energy, and dizziness caused by low blood pressure. ~ Adam Trainor

My crystal ball or intuition tells me that in the '80s the impact of RIA [radioimmunoassay] on the study of infectious diseases may prove as revolutionary as its impact on endocrinology in the 60s. ~ Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor. ~ Margaret Chan

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care. ~ Laurie Garrett

Hand-washing is a potentially effective behavior that can lessen the threat of any individual getting sick from the flu or other infectious diseases, but without organized vaccine programs or quarantine plans, quelling disease outbreaks is unlikely. ~ Bethany Albertson

When I was doing 'Executive Orders,' I talked about Ebola to people who know about infectious diseases and their use as weapons of war, and guys told me that these weapons are more psychological than physical. ~ Tom Clancy

Infectious diseases have become less prominent as causes of death and disability in regions of improved sanitation and adequate supplies of antibiotics. ~ Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

China and other members should join efforts to combat serious infectious disease, such as bird flu. To enhance the cooperation on the prevention of bird flu is an important target of the organization, which includes Russia, China and four Central Asian states. ~ Wen Jiabao

In large groups of enclosed people who were not allowed out, infectious diseases spread like wildfire. For example, in the 1880s in a workhouse in Kent, it was found that in a child population of one hundred and fifty-four, only three children did not have tuberculosis. ~ Jennifer Worth

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is an institute of the National Institutes of Health that is responsible predominantly for basic and clinical research in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of immunologic and infectious diseases. ~ Anthony Fauci

It's time to close the books on infectious diseases, declare the war against pestilence won, and shift national resources to such chronic problems as cancer and heart disease. ~ William H. Stewart

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the early twenty-first century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald's than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack. Hence ~ Yuval Noah Harari

He grinned. It was the sort of grin that Agnes supposed was called infectious but, then, so was measles. ~ Terry Pratchett

When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense.

If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.

The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children.

Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.

They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

C. diff is not a simple "stomach bug" like viral gastroenteritis or food poisoning that disappears in nearly all patients after a week or two. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

Approximately eight hundred skeletons from the Dickson Mounds in the lower Illinois Valley have been analyzed. They reveal a clear picture of the health changes that accompanied the shift from foraging to corn farming around 1200 AD. Archaeologist George Armelagos and his colleagues reported that the farmers' remains show a 50 percent increase in chronic malnutrition, and three times the incidence of infectious diseases (indicated by bone lesions) compared with the foragers who preceded them. Furthermore, they found evidence of increased infant mortality, delayed skeletal growth in adults, and a fourfold increase in porotic hyperostosis, indicating iron-deficiency anemia in more than half the population. ~ Christopher Ryan

Many people infected with C. diff are sick with diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, and weight loss. Others are "carriers" of C. diff with no signs or symptoms of disease. Some of these carriers have been recently infected with C. diff but have recovered and now feel well. But carriers still have the C. diff organism in their stools and can serve as a silent reservoir of infection in hospitals and nursing homes. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

The pure culture is the foundation for all research on infectious disease. ~ Robert Koch

We've gone from a preponderance of acute and infectious disease as a source of premature death to chronic diseases, which are the preponderance of the burden of illness in most of the world. That puts a much higher premium on the prevention of chronic disease than ever in history. ~ Harvey V. Fineberg

Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Testing stools for C. diff in patients after they have finished their Flagyl or Vanco for 10 days and after their bowel movements have returned to normal (that is, formed and not watery) is a waste of time and money, and is not helpful to the doctor or patient. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as 'the original affluent societies'. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

C. diff can sometimes be life-threatening, even in healthy young adults. ~ J. Thomas LaMont

When it comes to brain health issues, many of our children are as vulnerable today as children a hundred years ago were to infectious diseases. Far ~ Sue Klebold

There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view. Of what use is it to perpetuate the misery of tuberculosis, and such diseases, as we now do? Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the Lions!

Our humanitarianism, which is the syphilis of the mind, acts on the basis of the lie that the King must die. The King is beyond death; it is merely a pool where he dips for refreshment. We must therefore go back to Spartan ideas of education; and the worst enemies of humanity are those who wish, under the pretext of compassion, to continue its ills through the generations. The Christians to the Lions!

Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions. Nature herself may be trusted to do this, if only we will leave her alone. But what of those who, physically fitted to live, are tainted with rottenness of soul, cancerous with the sin-complex? For the third time I answer: The Christians to the Lions!

Hadit calls himself the Star, the Star being the Unit of the Macrocosm; and the Snake, the Snake being the symbol of Going or Love, the Dwarf-Soul, the Spermato ~ Aleister Crowley

In today's world, new infections and diseases can spread across the country and even across the world in a matter of days, or even hours, making early detection critical. ~ John Linder

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material. ~ Susan Sontag

Comparison is a disease, one of the greatest diseases. We are taught from the very beginning to compare. Your mother starts comparing you with other children. Your father compares. The teacher says, "Look at Johnny, how well he is doing, and you are not doing good at all!"

From the very beginning you are being told to compare yourself with others. This is the greatest disease; it is like a cancer that goes on destroying your very soul. Each individual is unique, and comparison is not possible. I am just myself and you are just yourself. There is nobody else in the world to be compared with. Do you compare a marigold with a roseflower? You don't compare. Do you compare a mango with an apple? You don't compare. You know they are different - comparison is not possible.

Man is not a species. Each man is unique. There has never been any individual like you before and there will never be again. You are utterly unique. This is your privilege, your prerogative, life's blessing - that it has made you unique. ~ Osho

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

It is changes that are chiefly responsible for diseases, especially the greatest changes, the violent alterations both in the seasons and in other things. ( ... regimen and temperature, and one period of life to another. ~ Hippocrates

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? ~ Aristotle.

This is the difference between someone whose heart is purified and sound and one whose heart is impure and corrupt. Impure people oppress, and the pure-hearted not only forgive their oppressors, but elevate them in status and character. In order to purify ourselves, we must begin to recognize this truth. This is what this book is all about - a book of self-purification and a manual of liberation. If we work on our hearts, if we actually implement what is suggested here, we'll begin to see changes in our lives, our condition, our society, and even within our own family dynamics. It is a blessing that we have this science of purification, a blessing that this teaching exists in the world today. What remains is for us to take these teachings seriously.
Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart. Translation and Commentary of Imam Mawlud's Matharat al-Qulub. Schaykh Hamza Yusuf. E-Book S. 10 ~ Hamza Yusuf

Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality. ~ Eric Hoffer

Whatever one does in this world, he does it out of compulsion; so it is indeed our lack of understanding when we scold someone for what they do. If you scold him, he will do it even more. (Instead) You should explain to him with love. All diseases will disappear with love. You will get pure love either from the Gnani Purush [the enlightened one] or his followers! ~ Dada Bhagwan

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. ~ Louis D. Brandeis

I love living. I think that's infectious, it's something you can't fake. ~ Will Smith

Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn is more optimistic and says, "Every sign, including genetics, says there's some causality [between telomeres] and the nasty things that happen with aging." She notes that there is a direct link between the shortened telomeres and certain diseases. For example, if you have shortened telomeres- if your telomeres are in the bottom third of the population in terms of length-then your risk of cardiovascular disease is 40 percent greater. "Telomere shortening," she concludes, "seems to underlie the risks for the diseases that kill you...heart disease, diabetes, cancer, even Alzheimer's. ~ Michio Kaku

People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful. ~ George Orwell

Virulence appears in a new light which cannot but be alarming to humanity; unless nature, in her evolution down the ages (an evolution which, as we now know, has been going on for millions, nay, hundreds of millions of years), has finally exhausted all the possibilities of producing virulent or contagious diseases - which does not seem very likely. ~ Louis Pasteur

There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of ~ Richard Dawkins

Instead of the Government spending $400,000 on immunisation, we may get far better health outcomes if we spend $100,000 in some other way, on nutrition for example ... When you have an expenditure on getting your community healthier, then the resistance to many childhood diseases is stronger. ~ Michael Moore

All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

...

Jerome K. Jerome

You're lucky you're good in
bed."
"Oh." He grabbed at my foot. "I think you keep me around for other reasons."
I slanted him a look out of the corner of my eye. "Right now, for the life of me I can't think what those reasons are."
Braden tugged harder on my foot, raising his fingers towards it. "Take it back or the foot getsit."
Oh hell no! I yanked at my appendage.
"Braden, no."
Deaf to my warning, he started to tickle me,his grip tightening as I laughed breathlessly and
kicked out, trying to get free.
He wouldn't stop. Ruthless!
"Braden," I panted hysterically, attempting to shove at him with my arms but struggling as he continued his war on my feet. I laughed harder,
ribs aching, and then… horror.
I broke wind.
Big time.
Braden immediately let go of my feet, his loud, rumbling laugh filling the room, laughter that only deepened when I lost balance, from kicking out
at him and then being abruptly let go, and fell off the couch with an undignified thud.
Mortified as he collapsed against the couch
belly laughing at my fart then fall, I grabbed a cushion and launched it at him from my position on the floor.
Of course this only made the idiot laugh
harder. I warred between feeling humiliation at farting in front of him, something you just didn't do in
company, and laughing, since his was so
infectious. "Braden!" I whined. "Shut up. It's not funny," I huffed, my lips caught i ~ Samantha Young

Dog days! "The sea boiled, the wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all other creatures became languid, causing to man, among other diseases, burning fever, hysterics and phrensies. ~ Jimmy Johnson Quoted In Arlo Janis Cartoon

But one thing I'd figured out about labels early on: naming something didn't actually help you fix it. That was really all psychology was. It catalogued mental diseases, made neat little charts with symptoms and checkboxes. It couldn't cure a damn thing - least of all me. Lance ~ Skye Warren

The richer we are, the longer we live. And the longer we live, the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older. ~ Alan Russell

The Caribbean is the region in the Americas worst affected by the epidemic of NCDs. These diseases are responsible for over two- thirds of deaths, much sickness and ill health, resulting in an unsustainable burden on our fragile economies. ~ Freundel Stuart

Crib death was so infrequent in the pre-vaccination era that it was not even mentioned in the statistics, but it started to climb in the 1950s with the spread of mass vaccination against diseases of childhood. ~ Harris L Coulter

In all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist." ~ Kenny Smith

People don't die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that's Progress, isn't it? Isn't it? ~ Harlan Ellison

This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries. ~ Walter Raleigh

The first Care in building of Cities, is to make them airy and well perflated; infectious Distempers must necessarily be propagated amongst Mankind living close together. ~ John Arbuthnot

IPS cells can become a powerful tool to develop new drugs to cure intractable diseases because they can be made from patients' somatic cells. ~ Shinya Yamanaka

Sickness is a benign rehearsal for death. With luck, some other understudy will go on in your stead before your final bow becomes inevitable. ~ Stewart Stafford

It would have been more to the point, more honest and more Christian, in past decades not to support those who intentionally destroyed healthy life than to rebel against those who have no other wish than to avoid disease. Moreover, a policy of laissez faire in this sphere is not only cruelty to the individual guiltless victims but also to the nation as a whole ... If the Churches were to declare themselves ready to take over the treatment and care of those suffering from hereditary diseases, we should be quite ready to refrain from sterilizing them. ~ Adolf Hitler

But a sigh is not (like a yawn) infectious; and we are all more prone to be sent to sleep than to sorrow by one another. ~ R.D. Blackmore

Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism. ~ Sextus Empiricus

Purifying the heart is a process. First, one must understand the necessity of having courtesy with God and the importance of fulfilling its requirements, as noted above. Second, one must be aware of the diseases of the heart - aware of their existence, their ailments, and the deleterious complications and troubles that ensue from them, and recognize that these diseases prevent one from attaining this courtesy. ~ Hamza Yusuf

How they succumbed to the same diseases,
which brought down the mighty Roman Empire.
The wrote all over al-Andalus "La-Ghaliba Illa'Llah"
{There is no vanquisher except Allah} but they
worshipped the mata'al-dunya {pleasure of the world}
and traded their souls for gold, glory, women and wine,
only to end like stray donkeys,
kicked around by the boots of Ferdinand and Isabella. ~ M. Kamal Hassan

War and good health are incompatible. There's no way we can go [eradicate diseases] into an area that is at war. ~ Jimmy Carter

There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Kindness is infectious. Spread the disease. ~ Danna Pycher

Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!
It is as I tell you. He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same. ~ Mark Twain