Seanan McGuire Quotes

A virus has three purposes: to duplicate, to infiltrate and to spread from one host to the next. Ultimately, even a single virus can shut down an entire system.

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.

People may have said that without symptoms, you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses.

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.

The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.

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.

But what has been pretty good about the coronaviruses in general is they keep their structural pieces very similar. What do I mean by that? There's certain - the outer coat, the envelope, and the inside part of the virus has stayed very constant.

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.

I knew the HIV virus was something anyone could get but also believed the chances were very slim... I honestly believed I had a better chance of winning the lottery than contracting this disease. I have never been so wrong in my life.

When I think of 'influence', I think of 'influenza', like somebody's picked up a germ.

Last week I got a flu that I caught, 'cause my daughter coughed ... into my mouth.

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

Just as the only reservoir for the typhus virus in nature is provided by man, so the only vector of infection is the louse. The bite of the louse is not virulent immediately after the infecting meal. It becomes so only towards the 7th day following infection.

What perhaps should receive more attention is the effect of the treatment on the virus.

What seems to be clear to me is that after the primary infection most of the cells die indirectly, but at the later stage, when the viral load is very high, the virus kills a lot of cells directly.

Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.

Images contaminate us like viruses.

In nature, disease-causing strains of avian influenza rarely spread far because the birds sicken and die before they can fly to spread it to others.

We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.

It's interesting to note that when something like a virus tries to poison us, the first thing our bodies do is heat up. We burn away the infection. Maybe that's what Earth is doing to us.

All infections, of whatever type, with no exceptions, are products of parasitic beings; that is, by living organisms that enter in other living organisms, in which they find nourishment, that is, food that suits them, here they hatch, grow and reproduce themselves.

I could foresee some terrific political and legal battles if women find out they have Zika in the later terms of their pregnancy.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

The Zika virus invades and disrupts the development of the fetal brain, but the effects on the brains of infants and young children are unknown.

People would ask, 'Why is your vocal cord paralyzed?' I said it was a virus. I didn't say it was an elective procedure to add hair to the front of my head. It was embarrassing. There's an embarrassing element to that.