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Epidemiology Quotes

Browse 26 quotes about Epidemiology.

Epidemiology Quotes

“Any subject whose history ranges from pump handles on London's Broad Street, tide tables, naval gunfire and models of social segregation is bound to have rich parentage. It took 'a village' to beget computational epidemiology: as a true multi-disciplinary subject, it evolved at the crossroads of mathematics, computation, statistics and medicine, with some contributions from systems biology, virology, microbiology, game theory, geography and perhaps even the social sciences.”

ScienceEpidemiologyComputational Simulation
Book:Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python
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“Changing mainstream media will be hard, but you can help create parallel options. More academics should blog, post videos, post audio, post lectures, offer articles, and more. You’ll enjoy it: I’ve had threats and blackmail, abuse, smears and formal complaints with forged documentation. But it’s worth it, for one simple reason: pulling bad science apart is the best teaching gimmick I know for explaining how good science works.”

ScienceStatisticsPseudoscienceSensationalismEpidemiologyBig PharmaCorporate Media
Book:I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
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“In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend. He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.”

CapitalismIdiotCovidEpidemiologySteven PinkerLiberlism
Book:Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century
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“For some reason there is a tendency to assume that one wild animal is a suitable model for another related species, whereas similar evidence would not be acceptable in human or veterinary medicine. For example, Shulaw etal. (1986) developed a serologic test to detect antibodies to Mycobacterium aviumssp. paratuberculosisin white-tailed deer, but determined the validity of the test “in deer” by using samples from infected sika and fallow deer. It is doubtful that a test developed to detect disease in humans would be accepted for use in public health circles, if its validity had been established by using squirrel monkeys and baboons!”

DiseaseWildlifeEpidemiologyWildlife Disease
Author:Gary Wobeser
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“Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7.”

ScienceVirusesEpidemiology
Book:It's Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes
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“Few diseases have had an impact on human evolution, culture and society on par with malaria. It is one of the oldest documented infectious diseases. Indeed, it has been hypothesised that the protective effect bestowed by a heterozygous sickle cell allele explains its survival to the modern day. As such, malaria has left its footprint on human evolution in a profound way few other diseases have. Yet its true origins were the matter of considerable controversy. The clue is in the name – the prevailing theory until Ross's discovery was that malaria resulted from 'mala aria', that is, 'bad air'. It took the advent of modern evidence-based medical science to challenge this 'miasma theory'. Ross's elucidation of the role of mosquitoes in the lifecycle of malaria has opened up a new subject for epidemiological consideration: the vector-borne disease.”

EvolutionMalariaEpidemiologyCoevolutionMiasma
Book:Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python
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“higher antimicrobial loads will result in a lower total pathogenic load but also a lower involvement of the immune system and therefore less immunity in the long run (as indeed has been empirically demonstrated in a number of experiments summarised in a sweeping review by Benoun (2016)). Thus, while rapid and aggressive antimicrobial treatment is sometimes appropriate, the long-term absence of ensuing CD4+ immunity is its cost.”

Immune SystemAntibioticsEpidemiologyImmunologyAntibiotic Resistance
Book:Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python
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“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.”

PandemicEpidemicsVirusEpidemiology
Book:And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
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“Concerning intelligence, "the capability to identify what to carefully examine—often a decision driven by mathematical analysis—has become as essential as the capacity to gather the intelligence itself." K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003. intelligence, "the capability to identify what to carefully examine—often a decision driven by mathematical analysis—has become as essential as the capacity to gather the intelligence itself." -- K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003.”

ScienceIntelligenceEspionageEpidemiology
Book:Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security, 3 volume set
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“Future generations of effective intelligence and law enforcement officers seeking to thwart the threats posed by tyrants, terrorists, and the technologies of mass destruction might be required to be as knowledgeable in the terminology of epidemiology as they are with the tradecraft of espionage." -- K. Lee Lerner. Cornwall, U.K. May, 2003.”

SecurityIntelligenceEspionageEpidemiology
Book:Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security, 3 volume set
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“Or, if I take that same auditorium and I make it much bigger and put more space between seats, it'll be quieter because it's much harder when you're not in physical contact with people to spread a virus from person-to-person, right? There are all sorts of patterns that we see in epidemiology that help us understand why something spreads.”

PeopleIfsPersonsHelpingSpaceBiggerHarderPatternsSpreadContactSeatsVirusesSpace BetweenAuditoriumsEpidemiology
Author:Seth Godin
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“The whole idea of what is evidence for causation in epidemiology cannot be separated from tTindustry understood that if they could raise doubt about how you could conclude something caused cancer, that they put so much effort into getting so many receptive public health authorities to say, "Well, causation requires that these five things be met." So that is, in fact, nonsense.”

IfsWellsIdeasWholeFactsEffortDoubtFiveMetsAuthorityUnderstoodEvidenceRaisesCancerNonsensePublic HealthReceptiveCausationEpidemiology
Author:Devra Davis
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“But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.”

WayGivingHeartMeanSoulBodyLightFeetStrangeBecomingSixMy FamilyOne WayExpertsShakesBuriedDirtVirusesTropicalConspiratorsEpidemiology
Author:Barbara Kingsolver
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“I do think the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus... Religion is a terrific meme. That's right. But that doesn't make it true and I care about what's true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus. It does its job magnificently well. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing. It doesn't mean that I don't want to see it stamped out.”

ThinkingWantMindWellsMeanDoeCareJobsAtheismParticularDiseaseCatholicGood ThingsI CareTerrificVirusesMemesRoman CatholicSmallpoxEpidemiologyCatholic Religion
Author:Richard Dawkins
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