Charles Jules Henry Nicole Quotes

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

It's true that my research expertise is in biology: for example, the Ebola virus, the Marburg virus, and monkey pox, and not bacteriology as in the case of the anthrax organism. It's also true that I have never, ever worked with anthrax in my life. It's a separate field from the research I was performing at Fort Detrick.

We don't know what we don't know about Ebola. We think we know it's a virus, but is it mutating? Can it be spread by airborne?

From the disease of one the whole flock perishes.

I’m from the health department. You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary? This fella’s got enough typhoid to start his own colony.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent.

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.

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.

It's extremely likely that the people who have never been exposed to a human who has leprosy, it's very likely they got leprosy from exposure to an armadillo.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

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.

In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.

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.

What the experts are telling me is that there's very little chance that Ebola is going to mutate into something that could spread directly through the air. The real concern is not whether Ebola could go airborne, but whether it could spread faster.

The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

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.

Especially working in infectious disease, it's very interesting because these infectious diseases, these agents, they evolve over time. So it's very much an arms race and understanding how each changes to protect itself and to continue. And so it's very much this puzzle-solving but with this great urgency and importance in what you find.

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

Cholera is even more severe among populations who are immunologically naive.

Well, I have been trained my entire life to recognize these outbreaks and recognize viruses. I have a Ph.D. in virology.

It did not seem likely that I was destined to undertake research on typhus.

Baseball and malaria keep coming back.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

Ebola isn't a respiratory virus. It doesn't spread through the airborne route. So it's not likely to spread like wildfire around the world and kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. That's what I think of as the next big one.