Jonas Salk Quotes

All infections, of whatever type, with no exceptions, are products of parasitic beings; that is, by living organisms that enter in other living organisms, in which they find nourishment, that is, food that suits them, here they hatch, grow and reproduce themselves.

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

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

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

Virus particles contain single molecules of nucleic acid.

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.

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.

There exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative.

Contagion has become very much a phenomenon, and it's a phenomenon of globalization.

Bram Stoker's 'Dracula,' in my reading, is really obviously about disease and our relation to disease.

You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere.

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.

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.

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

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.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

We had a week off in the middle of shooting, but as soon as everyone stopped, we all went down with six different types of flu and other unmentionable diseases.

I sing and play the guitar, and I'm a walking, talking bacterial infection.

I ain't afraid of germs, man. And I ain't afraid of getting sick.

Of course when you look back from all the pandemics that have happened in the world, they were really scary.

But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.

And that almost killed you?" "It wasn't deep but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.

As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted.

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

More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard or seen since the beginning of time …. Whoever touched the sick and dead was immediately infected and died …. That pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein.