Andrea Barrett Quotes

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

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.

Epidemiologists study patterns in order to combat infection. Stories about epidemics follow patterns, too. Stories aren't often deadly, but they can be virulent: spreading fast, weakening resistance, wreaking havoc.

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

With infectious disease, without vaccines, there's no safety in numbers.

The border patrol gave us a list of the diseases that they're concerned about, and Ebola was one of those.

We don't know why, but there are some gradients of infection.

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.

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.

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.

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

Contagious and infectious diseases have been largely overcome.

Infectious diseases ... have probably been the most dangerous of enemies of mankind, much more so than war and mass murder. When one studies the constant epidemics of the past and the deficiency diseases on land and at sea, one realizes that the whole of civilization could have succumbed, and one is constantly surprised that mankind has survived.

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

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

In 'Pox: An American History,' Michael Willrich meticulously traces the story of how the smallpox vaccine was pressed into service during a major outbreak.

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

My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea.

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

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

When you're dealing with new and emerging diseases, you have no idea and you can't predict in advance what would happen.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans - an avian flu pandemic.

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

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