John Ball Quotes

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.

We've all learned about this disease since it was first discovered several years ago in Europe. And so I think we've learned from the European experience.

We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.

New diseases like SARS and bird flu cause anxiety in the community. People get worried, some to the extent that it even affects their health. You feel very sad, and yet you must carry on and maintain your cool in very trying and difficult moments. You have to tough it out.

Great Britain had a much different situation than we do and did here in the United States, in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks. Their infectivity in this disease happened before very much was known about it.

You can have an epidemic in a state. You can have it in a region. You can have it in a country where the critical level of disease passes a certain threshold, and we call that an 'epidemic threshold.'

Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction, many species were spreading, and there were many diseases.

Climate change affects the occurrence and spread of disease by impacting the population size and range of hosts and pathogens, the length of transmission season, and the timing and intensity of outbreaks.

Pandemics happen. When they do, they change the world.

Global pandemics---whether naturally occurring or intentionally spread---pose a greater threat than most man-made weapons of mass destruction.

Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.

These people are becoming very sensible of the baneful effects produced on their morals, their health and existence, by the abuse of ardent spirits, and some of them earnestly desire a prohibition of that article from being carried among them. The legislature will consider whether the effectuating that desire would not be in the spirit of benevolence and liberality which they have hitherto practiced toward these our neighbors, and which has had so happy an effect toward conciliating their friendship.

It entered Egypt at the end of the season when the grasslands turn green, hence in the autumn of the year 748…This epidemic was distinctive in that it did not particularly affect one region and leave another untouched but spread to all parts of the Earth, in the East as in the West…Furthermore, it encompassed not just the human species but also the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the animals in the field…

During these times there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated …. For it did not come in a part of the world nor upon certain men, nor did it confine itself to any season of the year, so that from such circumstances it might be possible to find subtle explanations of a cause, but it embraced the entire world, and blighted the lives of all men, though differing from one another in the most marked degree, respecting neither sex nor age.

It seems as though you white folks bring poison to us Indians. Sickness comes with you, and hundreds of us die.

We eat the white man’s food, and it makes us soft: we wear the white man’s heavy clothing and it makes us weak…Yes – we know when you come, we die

during the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water, so that many die miserably. Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, together with other trouble, as ... the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The misery reaches the climax when a gale rages for 2 or 3 nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously.

What is the matter with us Indians that we are sick in our own air and these strangers [colonial whites] are well.

The Europeans liked to believe it was their valor, superior weapons and culture that won the New World. The real conquistadors were the armies of pathogens that raced on ahead to infect and kill 9 out of 10 of all the Indians of North, Central, and South America. The civilizations of the New World crumbled under the onslaught of invading microbes. Without this invisible army, Cortez and those who followed might never have stood a chance.

We’re in a globalized world and the risk [of epidemics] is shared..

The spread of the disease is under control. What I worry about is the spread of fear of the disease is not under control.

We can't predict when infectios diseases will break out, but their breakout is inevitable. That is why we must be prepared.

Sometimes your immune system gets a little heated, and you're more susceptible to getting some illnesses that way.

Health is both the foundation of my academic and professional careers and a personal passion. I know first-hand the important role health security plays in protecting lives and preventing the spread of disease.

Since the most ancient times, all men, and particularly those who endeavored in the practice of medicine, have brought closer together two natural phenomena of capital importance: illness or fever and fermentation.