Richard Preston Quotes

Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them.

The most confounding thing of all is that we still haven't identified the cause of 20% to 30% of adult common colds.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.

I'm recovering from a cold. I'm so full of penicillin that, if I sneeze, I'll cure someone.

The swine flu is evolution, isn't it? In a way, it's an evolution of flu.

I think I first encountered Ebola from the movie 'Outbreak.' Then there was the book 'The Hot Zone.' It's the type of thing you either read and say, 'Oh wow, that's terrifying,' or you read it and say, 'Oh wow, I want to do that.' I read it and said, 'Oh wow, I want do that.'

If someone has Ebola at a cocktail party they're contagious and you can catch it from them.

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.

Even if it had not been possible to reproduce the disease in animals and consequently to verify the hypothesis, this simple observation would have been sufficient to demonstrate the way in which the disease was propagated.

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

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.

If you really want to isolate a disease, then you have to isolate the people who carry it.

I had never heard of staph until I got it. Didn't really know what was. Still don't really know what it is, but I know you just don't want to have it.

If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.

During the Volvo China Open in April 2011, a lot of players fell ill. My son also was taken ill. I contracted a strange viral later, which had symptoms of swollen ankles and wrists and has left me weakened.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

A carrier with a venereal disease can have many partners, but only those whose mental and physical immune systems are weak will be susceptible to it.

The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.

This is an industry that doesn't have the common cold... It has cholera.

I demonstrated the characteristics of experimental fever. It appears after an incubation period which is never less than five days. It follows the same pattern as natural fever in man, but is of shorter duration and less pronounced.

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.

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

I had a MRSA infection on my ankle. At the time, I had never heard of MRSA. I didn't really know a whole lot about it. It really scared me.

Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.

Staph lives on skin. That's the reason why many infections start as a boil.