“As epidemiologists, we are interested in equilibria because stable equilibria tell us when a system has attained stability -- or where it will, eventually, attain stability. Epidemics are 'extraordinary events'. The term 'outbreak', beloved of the popular media when commenting on epidemics, emphasises that we are dealing with a phenomenon that goes counter to 'business as usual'. Stable equilibria are nothing more than mathematical descriptions of states in which the system can settle again and attain a measure of normalcy.”
Source: Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python
“The world came uncomfortably close to a pandemic in late 1989, when – largely overshadowed by the sweeping political changes and the end of the Cold War –, cynomolgus monkeys (crab-eating macaques, Macaca fascicularis) at a quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, began to succumb with rather frightening rapidity to an outbreak of a haemorrhagic fever.”
Source: Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python
“The bathhouses weren’t open because the owners didn’t understand they were spreading death. They understood that. The bathhouses were open because they were still making money.”
Source: And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
“A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.”
Source: Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World
“An inner cancer of the soul, wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the bug in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.”
Source: Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World
“Mental illness is an underreported epidemic today as social media addiction and less than optimal mental states quietly go hand in hand.”
Source: Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
“An upsurge in new cases, the highest number for one twenty-four-hour period yet, and an alarming rise in the contact curve. People who hadn’t been hit were getting bold. They were getting bored, going next door to talk to the neighbors, thinking things weren’t really that bad, gravitating back toward normalcy. Several shopkeepers opened their stores, defied the police to send them home, claiming the whole thing was blown out of proportion. They found out, soon enough, but by then other cases were breaking discipline. Another day, another big rise in new cases and a doubling of contacts.”
Source: The Fourth Horseman
“Leave everything and follow me,' Christ is sup- posed to have said; the commandment is infinite, it demands a new humanity. Enigmatic and naked. It sweeps away the grandeurs of the world. One kind of poverty destroys, another exalts. There is a great mystery in that: to love the poor means to love baneful poverty, to stop despising it. It means to love mankind. For man is poor. Irremediably. We are poverty, buffeted between desire and disgust.”
Source: The War of the Poor
“The concept of an imported epidemic laying wast to vulnerable native inhabitants works just as well applied to the British, and other colonial nations, as it does to fungal spores.”
Source: The Triumph of the Fungi: A Rotten History
“There are many pandemics in today’s world, some less purely imaginary than others, and of these the pathological need for ever-increasing complexity nears the top of the list.”
Source: Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality