Pardis Sabeti Quotes

It's true that my research expertise is in biology: for example, the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, and monkey pox, and not bacteriology as in the case of the anthrax organism. It's also true that I have never, ever worked with anthrax in my life. It's a separate field from the research I was performing at Fort Detrick.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

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.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

As life forms, viruses are just inherently interesting. It's the microworld - this universe of life too small for us to see - but it's profoundly complicated, and immensely powerful. Ebola is like a beautiful and frightening predator. There is a wonder in the operations of nature that can't be denied, even when we're the losers.

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.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

In nature, disease-causing strains of avian influenza rarely spread far because the birds sicken and die before they can fly to spread it to others.

You better have your disease program in line. The bugs are evolving quicker than our anti-biotics.

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

Well, I have been trained my entire life to recognize these outbreaks and recognize viruses. I have a Ph.D. in virology.

As an undergraduate majoring in biology at the University of California, San Diego, I worked on infectious diseases at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

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.

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

The discovery that I soon made that the guinea pig was also susceptible to infection made it possible for me, from the third year on, to preserve the virus on this animal.

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

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.

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.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.

High levels of stress can lead to weakened immunity, rendering animals much more susceptible to disease. This makes the average poultry factory farm a hotbed for outbreaks of avian flu.

NIH biodefense research is ultimately directed toward the development of new and effective medical countermeasures, including vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics against potential bioterror agents.

It’s not the mosquitoes who spread the disease [Zika]. Mosquitoes don’t travel more than 500 yards from where they are born. It’s the people. They travel.