Threlkeld Infectious Disease Quotes

#1. 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. #Quote by William Crawford Gorgas

#2. Once C. diff leaves the colon of the infected patient in a liquid stool, it usually converts to a spore that is like a seed that lies dormant in the hospital until it gets picked up by a suitable human host. Once swallowed, C. diff germinates (hatches) in the bowel and starts a new cycle of infection. #Quote by J. Thomas LaMont

#3. What was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter - just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward lust and death, was doubtless taken when, as the result of a tickle by some unknown incursion, spirit increased in density for the first time, creating a pathologically rank growth of tissue that formed, half in pleasure, half in defense, as the prelude to matter, the transition from the immaterial to the material. #Quote by Thomas Mann

#4. 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. #Quote by Hans Zinsser

#5. The pure culture is the foundation for all research on infectious disease. #Quote by Robert Koch

#6. Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code. #Quote by Arthur Koestler

#7. At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I've had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture. #Quote by Martha Beck

#8. Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. #Quote by Peter Hoeg

#9. When I came to University of California, San Francisco to work on infectious disease, I looked around to different options, and malaria was particularly interesting and fascinating to me. It's amazing that after 100 years of study of this little parasite, we've not been able to effectively control it. #Quote by Joseph DeRisi

#10. The extra time and trouble required to follow Dr. Bob's alternative schedule are hard to justify unless the dangers of contracting infectious diseases early in life are minimized and the dangers of vaccinating early in life are exaggerated. Much of The Vaccine Book is devoted to this minimization and exaggeration. Tetanus is not a disease that affects infants, according to Dr. Bob, Hib disease is rare, and measles is not that bad. He does not mention that tetanus kills hundreds of thousands of babies in the developing world every year, that most children will encounter the bacteria that causes Hib disease within the first two years of their lives, and that measles has killed more children than any other disease in history. #Quote by Eula Biss

#11. 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. #Quote by Bethany Albertson

#12. Love is the most infectious disease, so spread it as much as you can, as quick as you can; there is no remedy for love but it prevents all other diseases from spreading. #Quote by Debasish Mridha

#13. In the past five years, C. diff has spread across the globe, helped in large part by air travel, the availability and frequent use of antibiotics, and the graying of the world's population. #Quote by J. Thomas LaMont

#14. Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation. #Quote by Alice Miller

#15. Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely. #Quote by Boris Pasternak

#16. Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth. #Quote by Richard Preston

#17. Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world. The dragons are all dead and the lance grows rusty in the chimney corner ... About the only sporting proposition that remains unimpaired by the relentless domestication of a once free-living human species is the war against those ferocious little fellow creatures, which lurk in dark corners and stalk us in the bodies of rats, mice and all kinds of domestic animals; which fly and crawl with the insects, and waylay us in our food and drink and even in our love #Quote by Hans Zinsser

#18. In low-income countries, the main problems you have is infectious diseases. #Quote by Bill Gates

#19. Given the central place that technology holds in our lives, it is astonishing that technology companies have not put more resources into fixing this global problem. Advanced computer systems and artificial intelligence (AI) could play a much bigger role in shaping diagnosis and prescription. While the up-front costs of using such technology may be sizeable, the long-term benefits to the health-care system need to be factored into value assessments.
We believe that AI platforms could improve on the empirical prescription approach. Physicians work long hours under stressful conditions and have to keep up to date on the latest medical research. To make this work more manageable, the health-care system encourages doctors to specialize. However, the vast majority of antibiotics are prescribed either by generalists (e.g., general practitioners or emergency physicians) or by specialists in fields other than infectious disease, largely because of the need to treat infections quickly. An AI system can process far more information than a single human, and, even more important, it can remember everything with perfect accuracy. Such a system could theoretically enable a generalist doctor to be as effective as, or even superior to, a specialist at prescribing. The system would guide doctors and patients to different treatment options, assigning each a probability of success based on real-world data. The physician could then consider which treatment was most appropriate. #Quote by William Hall

#20. What is more dangerous than to become a poet? which is, as some say, an incurable and infectious disease. #Quote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

#21. I have seen this happen in recent years with regard to pharmaceuticals and vaccines, where, working together, we are improving access to medicines and vaccines for infectious diseases in the poorest countries. #Quote by Gro Harlem Brundtland

#22. That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease. #Quote by Don DeLillo

#23. [T]here are no illnesses in nature, only relationships. There are, of course, naturally occurring events, including infectious viruses, malignant growths, ruptures of tissues, and unusual chromosome constellations, but these are not ipso facto illnesses. Without the social meaning that humans attach to them they do not constitute illness or disease:

The fracture of a septuagenarian's femur has, within the world of nature, so more significance than the snapping of an autumn leaf from its twig; and the invasion of a human organism by cholera germs carries with it no more the stamp of "illness" than the souring of milk by other forms of bacteria. (Sedgwick, 1972, p. 211) #Quote by Peter Conrad

#24. Despite the prominence that "magic bullets" and "wonder drugs" hold in the layman's mind, most of the really decisive battles in the war against infectious disease consisted of measures to eliminate disease organisms from the environment. An example from history concerns the great outbreak of cholera in London more than one hundred years ago. A London physician, John Snow, mapped occurrence of cases and found they originated in one area, all of whose inhabitants drew their water from one pump located on Broad Street. In a swift and decisive practice of preventative medicine, Dr. Snow removed the handle from the pump. The epidemic was thereby brought under control - not by a magic pill that killed the (then unknown) organism of cholera, but by eliminating the organism from the environment. #Quote by Rachel Carson

#25. 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. #Quote by J. Thomas LaMont

#26. 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. #Quote by Brenda Wilmoth Lerner

#27. The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#28. As the mother of the ten-month-old hospitalized in San Diego said, if people want to make that choice, they should go live on an island with its own schools and doctors: "their own little infectious disease island. #Quote by Deborah Blum

#29. Some studies have reported C. diff in food purchased in a supermarket. Dogs, horses, pigs, and rabbits can also be carriers of C. diff, although spread of disease from pets or domestic animals to humans has yet to be documented. Like most infections, it is usually impossible to pinpoint the source of C. diff. #Quote by J. Thomas LaMont

#30. I really do think cancer will largely be a solved problem. I think most of the infectious diseases like malaria - our foundation is very involved - once we're finishing polio eradication, then starting up this malaria eradication, and getting that done as fast as we can. #Quote by Bill Gates

#31. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in "The King in Yellow," all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect. #Quote by Robert W. Chambers