David Quammen Quotes

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.

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

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.

The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.

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?

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.

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

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.

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

The discovery that I soon made that the guinea pig was also susceptible to infection made it possible for me, from the third year on, to preserve the virus on this animal.

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.

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 the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.

Ebola is a nasty disease to get. It's scary. But as a weapon, it is probably not likely. Ebola is a difficult malady to weaponize and deliver efficiently.

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.

There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.

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

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.

Unlike some viruses, we don't know what the natural reservoir is for Ebola. A lot of people think it's bats, but it's still very controversial; it could have been circulating in insects, in an environment, or in individuals.

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.

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.

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 largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.