David Draiman Quotes

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.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there.

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.

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…

The Ebola epidemic is the worst health emergency there has been in modern times.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The "pox," as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity.

There is a contagion in example which few men have sufficient force of mind to resist.

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.

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.

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

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

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.

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

If you're in a confined aircraft; when one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft.

Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.

Initially, there were a lot of fears that Ebola could mutate to become the airborne Andromeda strain that would wipe us all out.

I know one man who was impotent who gave AIDS to his wife and the only thing they did was kiss.

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.

Pandemics happen. They have happened three times in the last 100 years…. They change the politics, the culture, the society. Pandemics do that …. Pandemics reshape history …. The likelihood of a pandemic is almost certain…. The consequences are worldwide.