Contamination Quotes
The distrust and perception by many Muslims of non-Muslims is a practical and ethical problem. To many fundamentalist Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Animists—all non-Muslim Human Beings—are not only wrong but filthy and disgusting—in the same category as urine and feces. What is amazing however, that despite this paranoid view of ‘others’ Islamic nations have produced so many great physicians who compassionately have contact with impure non-believers every day. It also illustrates that most Muslims do not hold all the beliefs of their more fanatic co-religionists.
Perhaps the most famous quotation in all of Political Science is Lord Acton’s observation about power. See {292904}. What is fascinating is that 74 years earlier, Shelly, the most famous of the English Poets expressed the same idea in one of his great poems.
This is an amazing quotation and shows that the Ancient Romans who had a very sophisticated medical technology had a notion of germs and microbes. Ancient Rome was the first organized nation for which health, medicine, public health, and medical research were governmental functions unlike Greece and other civilizations where health was a personal function. Roman policy emphasized prevention unlike the Greeks. Sanitation and water supply and quality were government responsibilities and the Roman standard was not reached in the rest of the world until the 18th century. Heath and medicine was also a major military responsibility. The Roman Empire depended on its army, and trained professional soldiers. Disease was a greater risk to the soldiers than were battlefield casualties, and the Romans had a strong vested interest in keeping these highly trained men alive and healthy—not just the wealthy Roman citizens. The Romans were open to techniques that were developed throughout the Empire and beyond and tended to adopt all good ideas and a few bad ones as well While they had advanced surgery, the public health was the strongest aspect of Roman medicine and health and this notion of germs and disease. Remember that the writer was not a medical or scientific man, but was just indicating what was general wisdom of the Roman elite.
Manava Dharma Shastra. This text is a part of the Hindu Holy Texts. Hindus believe that Manu was a prophet whose text is revealed or inspired. This is one of the earlier prescriptions to maintain public health.
Any object that has been contaminated gradually loses its radioactive strength. It has a “half life”. This is the amount of time that it takes for the radiation in an object to lose half its strength. Different materials have different half lives. Nuclear waste from a power plant for example might have a half life of tens of thousands of years.
