Seth Berkley Quotes

Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.

Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time.

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.

Someone told me that they didn't want to take a flu shot because they didn't want to put a foreign substance in their body. What do they think they do at dinner every night?

A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.

Vaccination is the single most important step people can take to protect themselves from influenza.

If your body is working correctly, and then you get a cold or something, that cold probably won't knock you out as hard as it would have if you weren't healthy.

The right raw materials can... double or triple the protective power of the immune system.

We mostly don't get sick. Most often, bacteria are keeping us well.

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.

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.

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.

Many key concepts concerning the nature of immunity have originated from the very practical need to control virus infections.

From all the available evidence, the body has an excellent immune response to Zika. Therefore, once you get it once, you will never get it again.

Smallpox can be personally devastating. After a 14-day incubation period, patients experience high fevers, headaches, and sometimes severe abdominal pain. A rash resembling chicken pox appears in the mouth and throat, face, and forearms, and spreads to the trunk and legs. As patients recover, scabs break and pitted scars appear.

Think about your immune system as being an army, and it's fighting infection.

Almost no germ is unconditionally dangerous to man; its disease-producing ability depends upon the body's resistance.

Smallpox is natural; vaccine ain't.

I hope that some day the practice of producing cowpox in human beings will spread over the world - when that day comes, there will be no more smallpox.

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

If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.

I don't get sick much because in the U.S. I always eat with my fingers, you know, to get used to the bacteria.

When most members of a community are vaccinated, they protect those who are not by eliminating the viral reservoirs in the population. The effect is known as 'herd immunity.'

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.

Ninety percent of the cases of polio are in security-vulnerable areas.