Eula Biss Quotes

Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.

You see a virus very differently when it's caught and suspended on a slab of glass than when you're observing how it's ravaged a fellow human being.

I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals.

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.

Many key concepts concerning the nature of immunity have originated from the very practical need to control virus infections.

Vaccination is the single most important step people can take to protect themselves from influenza.

There are two main types of immunity to an infection. Innate immunity comes from circulating cells that attack any invader the body views as foreign. Adaptive immunity is specific to the pathogen presented. Through adaptive response, immune cells are programmed to secrete antibodies that are primed to target a viral invader.

I hope that some day the practice of producing cowpox in human beings will spread over the world - when that day comes, there will be no more smallpox.

Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

The right raw materials can... double or triple the protective power of the immune system.

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.

Left to their own devices, epidemic diseases tend to follow the same basic process: A virus or bacteria infects a host, who typically becomes sick and in many cases dies. Along the way, the host infects others.

Someone told me that they didn't want to take a flu shot because they didn't want to put a foreign substance in their body. What do they think they do at dinner every night?

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.

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

It's interesting to note that when something like a virus tries to poison us, the first thing our bodies do is heat up. We burn away the infection. Maybe that's what Earth is doing to us.

The only known cure for the Presidential virus is embalming fluid.

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

We were told in one lecture that it was possible to immunize against diphtheria and tetanus by the use of chemically treated toxins, or toxoids. And the following lecture, we were told that for immunization against a virus disease, you have to experience the infection, and that you could not induce immunity with the so-called "killed" or inactivated, chemically treated virus preparation. Well, somehow, that struck me. What struck me was that both statements couldn't be true.