Michael Specter Quotes

Not enough people know what Lyme disease is and the dangers of being bitten by an insect.

Lyme disease has become a fast epidemic worldwide. I am determined to help find a cure and figure out a way to share knowledge with the millions of people struggling with this debilitating disease.

Lyme disease is the most commonly reported tick-borne illness in the United States, and the incidence is growing rapidly. In 2009, the C.D.C. reported thirty-eight thousand cases, three times more than in 1991. Most researchers agree that the true number of infections is five to ten times higher.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established highly specific criteria for the diagnosis of Lyme disease: an acknowledged tick bite, the appearance of a bull's-eye rash, and, for those who don't live in a region where Lyme is common, laboratory evidence of infection.

Lyme disease is very debilitating. Being from the East Coast I know Lyme disease is quite common and may lay dormant and may produce flu-like symptoms, as well as neurological issues.

What person doesn't search online about their disease after they are diagnosed?

Research is what it's going to take to cure all these diseases.

Most breast cancer-related deaths can be prevented through simple and painless preventive measures. A late diagnosis can result in more serious, long-term consequences.

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.

I know runners who have suffered a tick bite and ended up with Lyme disease. I'll take an angry moose any day.

If Carter had been there when the AIDS crisis came up, it would have been a whole different story. It could have been treated like a legitimate disease.

Pneumococcal disease is a real threat. Pneumococcal disease is a bacterial infection that causes anything from middle ear infection to pneumonia to meningitis. Children are particularly vulnerable to it, but adults can get pneumococcal disease themselves.

Cancer does not discriminate.

By making more people aware of lymphoma, Worldwide Lymphoma Awareness Day hopes to save lives by increasing early diagnosis and suitable treatment.

Cancer is the ultimate nemesis that hangs in the balance for one in three women and one in two men in their lifetime.

Pneumonia is a disease that often flies under the radar of not just the public but even the global health community. It kills more children under 5 years old every year than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined.

Anthrax, it's something that gets you sick, it's horrible, strong. It's a heavy-metal band name if there ever was one.

Influenza is a serious disease. Kids die of influenza, both in Japan and the United States, and if you give a drug to people who are at risk of dying, there will be people who die who got the drug,... There is no signal the drug is doing it as opposed to the disease.

If caught early, Lyme is easily treated with antibiotics. But activists, and many researchers, have long contended that tens of thousands of people remain unaware that they have been infected - sometimes for years, during which the bacterium can spread to the heart, nervous system, and brain.

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.

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

Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.

I remembered reading about a disease called Leishmaniasis, which matched my symptoms. I'd always thought it was an old wives' tale - a sand fly bite that eats your flesh. But when I looked on the internet and saw pictures of people who had it, their lesions looked like mine.

More than 90% of cancers are curable at stage one - look for them, look for them, look for them.

Sometimes when you get sick and you go to the doctor, it can feel like you didn't get your money's worth if you don't come away with a pill. I've had many, many conversations with patients who I've cared for over the years about why it's actually in some cases better not to go home with antibiotics.