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Epidemics Quotes

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Epidemics Quotes

“The electrical, electronics and wireless radio frequency (RF) industries are creating an increasingly high radiation environment for the human. This is comparable to the elevated radiation environment found at high altitudes and smart health researchers would be wise to contrast high altitude diseases to the epidemics of our time, such as Autism, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Fibromyalgia, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), and so on.”

“My dear Gorgas, Instead of being simply satisfied to make friends and draw your pay, it is worth doing your duty, to the best of your ability, for duty’s sake; and in doing this, while the indolent sleep, you may accomplish something that will be of real value to humanity. Your good friend, Reed Dr. Walter Reed encouraging Dr. William Gorgas who went on to make history eradicating Yellow Fever in Havana, 1902 and Panama, 1906, liberating the entire North American continent from centuries of Yellow Fever epidemics.”

“Having a child has become a prodigiously artificial thing. It no longer has anything of the passionately accidental event about it; it has become the parthenogenetic fruit of a calculation of biological, dietary and psychosocial data and you wonder to what extent dream, desire or fatality are still involved. But perhaps the race is losing its interest in sexuality, preferring instead a sort of protozoan transplantation. Leaving out of account that what has been conceived by artificial insemination is very likely to continue its life in artificial intelligence and to die of built-in obsolescence. After the mechanical bride, the mechanical widow. Now every human being is the product of a sexual act, a sexual pact or else we should not be the human race. It takes a sexual copulation successfully to produce a human being, just as, among the Hindus, it takes a copulation between the word and silence for a sacrifice to be successfully carried out. In a sense the child is indeed the continuation of the species. But in another, he or she is a biological vestige of it. The further we go with change, genetic innovations and fashion, the more unreal it becomes, with each new generation, to put our trust in the processes of childbirth and organic growth. The simplicity and slowness of those things are entirely outside the range of our contemporary experience. How can we claim to exercise judgement if we have lost a sense of punishment? How can we claim to judge anything at all if we no longer accept being judged? And if we are no longer able either to judge or be judged, then we lose all hope of being absolved or condemned in the past or the future. Now, what can no longer be reflected in the past or the future takes place in a single instant with all its consequences. The Last Judgement becomes an immediate reality. We have right here before us the unchecked proliferation in epidemic proportions of all processes, the multiplication of all cancers on an epidemic scale.”

“In one respect New Orleans has set an example for all the world in the fight against yellow fever. The first impression was the complete organization of the citizens and the rational and reasonable way in which the fight has been conducted by them. With a tangible enemy in view, the army of defense could begin to fight rationally and scientifically. The... spirit in which the citizens of New Orleans sallied forth to win this fight strikes one who has been witness to the profound gloom, distress, and woe that cloud every other epidemic city. Rupert Boyce, Dean of Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases, 1905”

“The hospital’s long-time cook, Iryna, mechanically peeled potatoes as usual — breakfast had to be prepared for the patients. Work was work, and she was now the only breadwinner in her family. Yet today her thoughts were entirely at home. There, her pregnant daughter Maria had been struck down by typhus and had lain alone in critical condition for a week. To make matters worse, no one was with her. Normally, Iryna would visit her sick daughter during the day. But today the hospital was in emergency mode — another convoy of wounded from the civil war had arrived. A mother’s heart was tearing itself toward her child… though what could she really do? Wiping her hands on a towel, Iryna approached the small icon depicting the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus. She knelt, folded her hands to her chest, fixed her gaze on the immaculate face of the Mother of God — and began to pray. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: Set during the chaos of the Ukrainian Civil War and a typhus epidemic, this scene shows the quiet suffering of civilians. While the hospital is overwhelmed with wounded, a mother torn between duty and fear turns to faith — highlighting the human cost of war beyond the battlefield.”

“Soon after the birth, Maria was shown her son. He was no longer crying. The baby was tiny, frail, his skin wrinkled — yet his bright, restless eyes darted stubbornly in every direction, as if he were trying to take in this vast, unfamiliar, and beautiful world as quickly as possible. “You did well, Maria! You have a son! You did well!” Irina kissed her daughter’s hand joyfully. “Everything will be all right now.” Seeing her child, Maria felt relief wash over her. She longed to take him into her arms, to press him to her chest — but the baby was taken away. After the necessary procedures, the midwife quietly pulled Irina aside. “Breastfeeding is dangerous,” she whispered. “The baby could contract typhus. But he is premature, weak — and if he does not receive colostrum now, I fear he will not survive. The previous woman gave birth a week ago and has no colostrum left. I believe we must take the risk: newborns contract infection from sick mothers in only about a third of cases.” Irina looked at her grandson lying in her arms. He jerked his tiny hands and feet at random — then smiled clumsily. “God’s will be done,” she said firmly. “A child must drink his mother’s milk.” When the alcohol-sterilized breast was offered to the baby, it turned out his mouth was too small to take the nipple. Fortunately, the other breast was smaller — and the boy latched on with determined urgency. Holding the flesh of her flesh to her chest, feeling her son’s gentle sucking, Maria experienced a moment of pure euphoria. The terrible illness receded, making way for the overwhelming joy of motherhood. Neither Maria nor the newborn knew of the danger of infection. They were simply following the ancient law of nature. And Irina spent the rest of the day in prayer, asking God to spare two souls — her daughter and her grandson. — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book One Context note: During the Ukrainian Civil War of 1920, amid epidemics, hunger, and collapsing authority, a premature child is born into a world where survival depends on instinct, faith, and impossible choices. This moment captures motherhood and mercy standing against historical catastrophe.”

“Studies show that epidemics caused by viruses began when the human lifestyle changed from hunter-gatherer to agriculture over eleven thousand years ago. Due to a newfound ability to live in one place, humans began investing energy into their homes and land — activities that required many people to work in close proximity to each other.”

“The use of vaccine in the control of yellow fever should occupy more or less the same place that typhoid fever vaccine has in the control of typhoid fever. No sanitary authority would desire to substitute typhoid vaccine for the supply of pure water and food, so we must not accept the yellow fever vaccine as a substitute for the elimination of Aedes aegypti. The vaccine provides individual protection for the person who cannot be protected by more general measures.”

“To take a specific example, a researcher in the Journal of Traumatic Stress interviewed 129 women with documented histories of child sexual abuse that occurred between the ages of 10 months and 12 years. Of those, 38 percent had forgotten the abuse. Of the remaining women who remembered, 16 percent reported that they had for a period of time forgotten but subsequently recovered their memories. [46] Thus, during that time a "false negative" recorded for those women. These are the sort of distinctions for which Elaine Showalter in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media fails to account.”

“This is an infectious disease, Conant began. The CDC case-control study may offer some definitive word on how it was spread, but that research was stalled, probably for lack of resources. We are losing time, and time is the enemy in any epidemic. The disease is moving even if the government isn’t.”

“The women in the kitchen sang: Sarampión toca la puerta. Viruela dice: ¿Quién es? Y Escarlatina contesta: ¡Aquí estamos los tres! The cook would sometimes shout a little madly, “Sing it again!” And the women would sing again: Measles knocks at the door. Smallpox asks, Who’s there? And Scarlet Fever replies: All three of us are here!”

“This hegemonic simulation, a configuration that seems triumphant and unyielding, has its reverse, its revulsive effects. By virtually yielding to this global dynamic and exaggerating it in several ways, all of these would-be emerging countries gradually become submerging instead. They slowly invade the Western sphere, not on a competitive level, but like a ground swell. This invasion occurs in many ways, like a viral infiltration. It is the problem of global, more or less clandestine immigration (Hispanics are literally cannibalizing the United States). But also in the contemporary forms of terror, a true filterable virus, made up of terrorism and counterterrorism, and which is a violent abreaction to global domination, destabilizing it from the inside. The global order is cannibalized by terror.”

“Se pensarmos na Europa Oriental e na Ocidental como corpos-organismos distintos, o Deméter poderia ser então o vetor que carrega o patógeno-vampiro e o introduz no corpo deste novo hospedeiro suscetível, sem qualquer imunidade. Nem mesmo o vetor, entretanto, resiste à virulência do patógeno; ele próprio sucumbe à doença que inocularia, funcionando também como uma espécie de microcosmo do que poderia vir a acontecer caso o vampiro obtivesse sucesso em sua replicação: um cenário de desastre apocalíptico.”

“É possível verificar que conforme a doença-vampirismo se espalha pela narrativa, ela progressivamente a contamina com um discurso viral, que acaba permeando toda a ação: as pessoas se sentem “doentes”, “um lixo”, mas “deve ser só gripe”; se Mike está doente, “alguns acham que ele pegou alguma doença do Danny Glick”; quando a mãe de Danny Glick começa a ter sonhos estranhos com o filho morto, seu marido nota como “ela estava pálida [...] os lábios haviam perdido a cor natural, e ela ganhara olheiras escuras”; se a Casa Marsten fede, o odor “lembrava lágrimas, vômito e trevas”; se a indústria dos trailers cresce, ela cresce “como uma epidemia”; se o medo de uma doença indizível se espalha, “fantasias paranoicas podem ser contagiosas”; se o vampiro logra atacar-me, “não encosta em mim, fui contaminado”.”

“Mary Mallon was born in 1869 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, then part of British-ruled Ireland. Like many of her countrymen, she immigrated to the United States at a young age, where she eventually found employment as a cook. During her lifetime, it was suspected that she has unintentionally (albeit perhaps negligently) infected over fifty people with typhoid. Typhoid fever is a bacterial disease caused by gastrointestinal infection by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi. In most patients, it causes an unpleasant but manageable disease that resolves fully. However, as many as one in twenty patients become chronic carriers, who continue to be infectious for their lifetimes. Mary Mallon was one of the unfortunate few who fell into that category. It is hypothesised today that she contracted typhoid at birth. Her case, which involved prolonged quarantine on North Brother Island for almost half her life, raises complex moral and ethical questions about reconciling the interests of public health with the moral imperative to respect individual liberties and treat the sick (even if asymptomatic) with compassion.”

“Se o corpo físico do vampiro pode ter sido extirpado, ele mantém-se presente e vivo em sua inoculação da realização vívida de que suas fantasias fazem parte de nós, residindo como um vírus latente, incurável, que apenas aguarda uma baixa de imunidade para que possa reemergir.”

“Quammem afirma que vírus transmitidos pelo sangue precisam, em geral, de um vetor - frequentemente um inseto hematófago; aqui, uma capillaria — que deve “chegar em busca de uma refeição”: fica estabelecida uma intencionalidade. Tal como o inseto, o próprio verme é atraído pelo sangue humano, ampliando assim as condições possíveis de transmissão da síndrome vampiresca. Os resultados desse quadro de alta transmissibilidade e infectividade são imediatos, logo começando a ser sentidos sob a superfície da cidade.”

“Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.”

“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”

“As a doctor, let me tell you what self-love does: It improves your hearing, your eyesight, lowers your blood pressure, increases pulmonary function, cardiac output, and helps wiring the musculature. So, if we had a rampant epidemic of self-love then our healthcare costs would go down dramatically. So, this isn't just some little frou-frou new age notion, oh love yourself honey. This is hardcore science.”

“All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.”

“NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.”

“[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe.”

“The AIDS disease is caused by a virus, but the AIDS epidemic is not. The AIDS epidemic is fueled by stigma, by hate, by misinformation, by ignorance, by indifference. Science has accomplished miracles over the past 20 years, and science can now end this disease - but it cannot end the epidemic. We need more than medicine. We can do something about these things. We need to speak out about the changes we need to make in our society.”

“Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting. What part of democracy are they afraid of? I call on Republicans at all levels of government, with all manner of ambition, to stop fear mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud. I'm calling for universal, automatic voter registration, every citizen in every state in the union.”

“Our society is filled with runaways, dropouts, and quitters. The epidemic of walking away has hit our land with effects as devastating as the bubonic plague, and it has destroyed millions of effective lives and relationships. We are so self-centered that we have ceased to lay down our lives for others. We have seen others faint or walk away and we have followed in their weakness. We have fainted when we could have persevered by exchanging our strength for His! With His strength, not only could we have kept on walking, we could have run!”