Viral Transmission Quotes

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.

One thing about Covid-19 is clear: We don't fully understand its severity and transmission. At various turns, we've both underestimated and overestimated the virus.

While it is true that many hep C victims became infected through blood transfusions or organ transplants or in other innocent ways, mine was contracted during my college years, when I showed as much care for my personal health as your average suicide bomber.

Like SARS or Ebola, COVID-19 seems to be another disease that has jumped from the animal kingdom to the human and then traveled quickly because of trains, cars, airplanes, and people clustering in public places.

[AIDS ] is not a short-term emergency but it is something that, just like smallpox was many decades ago, we should aim for complete eradication.

We're shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren't very abundant and have competition, even within a single animal. We introduce them into a new, rich habitat called the human population, where they can flourish more abundantly and cause more trouble.

No war on the face of the Earth is more destructive than the AIDS pandemic.

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.

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

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.

We have seen that [Zika virus] has caused, and is causing, a whole series of problems for pregnant women and for their unborn children, and we are seeing that it is transmitted by mosquitos, and mosquitos are a serious matter during the summer in Florida. So we are very worried about those funds not being available. There is $500 million dollars available from the Ebola money that was not used. I think it is going to be used immediately.

Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't remember making any mistakes that might have exposed them.

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease.

The risk from viruses is an unanswered question - and it won't be answered until you have had organs transplanted into humans over many years.

Whereas HIV only in recent decades became infectious for humans, high risk papillomavirus types have in all likelihood been with us for millions of years, accompanying the human race since the early days of our evolution.

The word is now a virus.

The virus is moving quite substantially into new locations. My attention is pretty much equally divided between Europe, the southern Balkans and Black Sea area, Africa and south Asia.

Origins are of the greatest importance. We are almost reconciled to having a cold when we remember where we caught it.

The guy was infected with bird flu because he took a sick chicken, slaughtered it and and then ate it.

Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

Here's what's terrifying about Ebola. Ebola is invisible. It's a monster without a face. With the science that we have now, we can perceive Ebola as being not one thing but as a swarm, and the swarm is moving through the human population and expanding its numbers. It has the qualities of a monster.

Bits of ignorance are like viruses that are copied and spread by interaction.

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.

Eighty percent of Americans with HIV do not know they are infected.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.