Disease Outbreak Quotes

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.

It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?

Hand-washing is a potentially effective behavior that can lessen the threat of any individual getting sick from the flu or other infectious diseases, but without organized vaccine programs or quarantine plans, quelling disease outbreaks is unlikely.

in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII ordered that all cats seen in the company of women be considered their familiars; these witches were to be burned along with their animals. The cats’ extermination contributed to the growth of the rat population, so aggravating subsequent outbreaks of disease—which were blamed on witches

if superspreaders exist and can be identified during a disease outbreak, then control measures should be targeted at isolating those individuals, rather than applied more broadly and diffusely across an entire population.

Malaria eradication requires a 100% mind-set of success. There are no 70% or 80% or 90% efforts that pass in malaria control and eradication. One single infected mosquito that escapes can go on to bring death to dozens of victims in its lifespan, lay more eggs and restart an outbreak that progresses from a few to dozens to hundreds.

Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus.

When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight against the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably: from a neighborhood to an entire planet.

A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.

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’.

Sure, the disease- the inner illness- kills. nevertheless, it's the symptoms - right?- which disfigure, which denude, which scrofulate and scar and maim. it hurts, we say, but we don't care a howl about it; we never cared about it before the pain came, only until the pain came, only because the pain came (perhaps that's why we have to suffer now); and we don't care about it today. we care about the presence of our feeling. period. we want it gone. soonest. make the pain go away doc; rub the spots out; make the quarreling stop; let the war end. peace is the death we rest in under that stone that says so. [...] peace is everybody's favourite teddy, peace is splendiferous, and it's not simply the habit of the sandy-nosed. it's the "get well" word. but after all, without a symptom, what do we see? without an outbreak of anger or impatience, what do we feel? without a heart-warming war, would we ever know or care or concern ourselves with what was wrong? the trouble is that the wrong we care for is soon the war itself, the family wrangle, the bellyache, the coated tongue, the blurry eyes, the fever-ah- the fever in the fevertube.

The timing of Thomas Lewis’ illness suggests one chilling alternative history. The Broad Street outbreak had subsided in part because the only viable route between the well and the neighborhood’s small intestines had run through the cesspool at 40 Broad. When baby Lewis died, the connection had died with it. But when her husband fell ill, Sarah Lewis began emptying the buckets of soiled water in the cesspool all over again. If Snow had not persuaded the Board of Governors to remove the handle when he did, the disease might have torn through the neighborhood all over again, the well water restocked with a fresh supply of V. cholerae. And so Snow’s intervention did not just help bring the outbreak to a close. It also prevented a second attack.

You and I may not live to see the day,” Snow explained to the young curate, “and my name may be forgotten when it comes; but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past; and it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear.

now seemed to him that he was seeing a polymorphic disease. This is a disease that takes different forms in different people at different stages of the illness.

The hatred is not a feeling; it is a poisoning disease of mental and heart. One should eliminate before it outbreaks since it undermines the prestige, pride and national image.

Despite the prominence that "magic bullets" and "wonder drugs" hold in the layman's mind, most of the really decisive battles in the war against infectious disease consisted of measures to eliminate disease organisms from the environment. An example from history concerns the great outbreak of cholera in London more than one hundred years ago. A London physician, John Snow, mapped occurrence of cases and found they originated in one area, all of whose inhabitants drew their water from one pump located on Broad Street. In a swift and decisive practice of preventative medicine, Dr. Snow removed the handle from the pump. The epidemic was thereby brought under control - not by a magic pill that killed the (then unknown) organism of cholera, but by eliminating the organism from the environment.

The greatest risk of a deliberately planned urban epidemic is not that we won’t have a vaccine, it’s that we won’t recognize the outbreak until it’s too late for the vaccine to stop the spread of disease.

In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence had been buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease.'—NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO. 3, VOL. 135.

Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising again after a certain interval

As the public anxieties about infectious disease outbreaks rose in recent years with the advent of SARS, N1H1 flu, Ebola, and Zika, we observed in awe how the public would react to an impending outbreak in their midst and how those public fears would emerge and spread like, well, an epidemic. A wave of public angst anticipating an outbreak would swell, crest, and then subside, very much like the wave of the infection outbreak itself. In the wake of both waves, relief would follow.

occasional outbreaks of those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics will be unpredictable. And the market aberrations produced by them will be equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree. Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. Our goal is more modest: we simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful. As

And although better coverage of the outbreak’s evolution in the press couldn’t have stopped the influenza virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

was tied or directly attributable to the plague. The first lesson of this book is that plagues don’t just affect a population’s health. If they are not quickly defeated by medicine, any significant outbreak of disease sends horrible ripples through every aspect of society. In the wake of the Antonine plague, Rome

...because she remembered saying It seems like it's been fairly well contained, but here's an epidemiological question: if you're talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn't fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? ... A virus is either contained or it isn't. It's a binary condition.

Biomedical research is done by teams. The research is time-consuming and deeply expensive, and the results are often disappointing. With persistence, talent, and luck, and plenty of money, a biomedical research team can sometimes pull the veil off some small mystery of nature and the human body, and can find a better way to treat a disease.

The IRF had just been completed, after nine years of construction. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which in turn is a part of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. The IRF’s mission is to develop experimental drugs and vaccines, called medical countermeasures, that could defeat lethal emerging viruses and advanced biological weapons.

virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

Hospitals in almost every country have reported outbreaks of C. diff, and the number and severity of cases continues to soar. In 2010 there were 350,000 cases of C. diff diagnosed in U.S. hospitals. That means that of 1,000 patients admitted to U.S hospitals, 10 will become infected with C. diff, most of them elderly. In some hospitals and nursing homes, as many as one in five patients is infected.

billionaire’s death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: “dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!” Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major

We should appreciate that these recent outbreaks of new zoonotic diseases, as well as the recurrence and spread of old ones, are part of a larger pattern, and that humanity is responsible for generating that pattern. We should recognize that they reflect things that we’re doing, not just things that are happening to us. We should understand that, although some of the human-caused factors may seem virtually inexorable, others are within our control.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them. How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly. There are three elements to the situation.

this only helps dispute the belief that the Black Death was caused by rats. A plague outbreak is always preceded by the presence of a great many dead rats, since they are also susceptible to the disease. Now, unlike in Asia, in Europe there are no plague-resistant rodents that could act as a breeding ground for the disease and a distinct lack of accounts mentioning dead rats in any medieval literature. Also, despite two outbreaks of plague in Iceland in the fifteenth century rats did not settle on the island until much later.

People don’t line up in medical school to get intimate with AIDS, parasitic worms, and flesh-eating bacteria. The natural human impulse is to pull away and protect ourselves, and to think we’re safe because we’re not in some jungle, waiting for the next Ebola outbreak. But the truth is, in the big-city HMO where I work, I often get paged twenty or thirty times a day to size up infectious diseases that come from what we eat, what we breathe, what we touch, and where we go. The rare and mysterious cases I see walk into my hospital every day.

Smallpox epidemics had devastated Massachusetts at regular intervals in the ninety years since its founding. A 1677 outbreak wiped out seven hundred people, 12 percent of the population. During the epidemic of 1702, during which three of his children were stricken but survived, Cotton Mather began studying the disease. A few years later, he was introduced to the practice of inoculation by his black slave, who had undergone the procedure in Africa and showed Mather his scar. Mather checked with other blacks in Boston and found that inoculation was a standard practice in parts of Africa.

If they would have acknowledged this [SARS] early, and we could have seen the virus as it occurred in south China, we probably could have isolated it before it got out of hand,” explained one infectious disease expert. “But they completely hid it. They hide everything. You can’t even find out how many people die from earthquakes.”2438 The foundation of the theoretical models is openness and cooperation for rapid detection of outbreaks of influenza. “Would they admit to it if it was here?” one Asian diplomat asked. “That’s the big question, since they deny everything left, right and center.

And so it was with the Broad Street well that the decision to remove the pump handle turned out to be more significant than the short-term effects of that decision [Cholera outbreak abated.] . . . .But the pump handle stands for more than that local redemption. It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and V. cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. . . . For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition.

Consider this sobering statistic: Shortly before the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, CIDRAP undertook a national survey of hospital pharmacists and intensive care and emergency department doctors, as we detailed in chapter 18. The update of that survey identified more than 150 critical lifesaving drugs for all types of diseases frequently used in the United States, without which many patients would die within hours. All of them are generic and many, or their active pharmaceutical ingredients, are manufactured primarily in China or India. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, sixty-three were already unavailable to pharmacies on short notice or on shortage status under normal conditions—just one example of how vulnerable we are.

There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words hic incepit pestis, 'here began plague', in the burial part of the register three months later. Just how close this dread flea-borne disease was to the Shakespeares can be guaged from the fact that their Henley Street neighbour Roger Green lost four of his children and town clerk Richard Symons three. One estimate suggests that the town lost around two hundred, or about fifteen per cent, of its population during this single outbreak. It is a sobering thought how much the world could have lost at this time by one ill-chanced flea-bite.

...if we are to keep alive the model of sustainable metropolitan life that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible 150 years ago, it is incumbent on us to do, at the very least, two things. The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science... The second is to commit ourselves anew to the kinds of public health systems that developed in the wake of the Broad Street outbreak, both in the developed world and the developing: clean water supplies, sanitary waste-removal and recycling systems, early vaccination programs, disease detection and mapping programs. Cholera demonstrated that the nineteenth-century world was more connected than ever before; that local public-health problems could quickly reverberate around the globe.

The virosphere permeates the earth’s atmosphere, which is filled with viruses blowing in the wind. Around ten million virus particles land on every square meter of the earth each day, drifting down from the air. Viruses saturate the soil and the sea. A liter of seawater contains more virus particles than any other form of life. Viruses exist in vast numbers in the human gut, infecting all of the four thousand different kinds of bacteria that live naturally in a person’s intestines. Viruses can sometimes infect other viruses. A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.

here is something that is impossible for anyone to believe. The human species has been in existence as Homo sapiens for (let us not quarrel about the exact total) at least one hundred and fifty thousand years. An instant in evolutionary time, this is nonetheless a vast history when contemplated by primates with brains and imaginations of the dimensions that we can boast. In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, and expired during this time, often dying in childbirth or for want of elementary nurture, and with a life-expectancy of perhaps three decades at most. Add to these factors the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease, which had no germ theory to explain let alone palliate them, and associated natural disasters and human tragedies. And yet, for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then—and only in the last six thousand years at the very least—decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem. And heaven would only intervene and redeem in remote areas of the Middle East, thus ensuring that many more generations would expire before the news could begin to spread! Let me send a voice to Sinai and cement a pact with just one tribe of dogged and greedy yokels. Let me lend a son to be torn to pieces because he is misunderstood. . . . Let me tell the angel Gabriel to prompt an illiterate and uncultured merchant into rhetorical flights. At last the darkness that I have imposed will lift! The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greets magic tricks. It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses.

City officials may have destroyed evidence of the arrival of cholera-infected ships in the weeks before the outbreak, too. Following up on claims made by the port physician that the city had secretly quarantined passengers from a cholera-infected ship, investigators found that otherwise intact quarantine-hospital records for the months in question—April, May, and June 1832—had disappeared.50 * * * To be fair, the choices that nineteenth-century leaders had to make about whether or not to implement disease control strategies were not between two equally compelling options. The choices were between predictable costs and unpredictable benefits. They knew that quarantines and alerting the public about cholera would disrupt private interests, but they couldn’t be sure that either strategy would actually protect the public. It’s not surprising, then, that they opted for near-certain private benefits rather than mostly uncertain public ones. Plus they were under no obligation to do otherwise.

By the time that paper appeared, the SARS epidemic of 2003 had been stopped, with the final toll at 8,098 people infected, of whom 774 died. The last case was detected and isolated in Taiwan on June 15. Hong Kong had been declared “SARS-free.” Singapore and Canada had been declared “SARS-free.” The whole world was supposedly “SARS-free.” What those declarations meant, more precisely, was that no SARS infections were currently raging in humans. But the virus hadn’t been eradicated. This was a zoonosis, and no disease scientist could doubt that its causal agent still lurked within one or more reservoir hosts—the palm civet, the raccoon dog, or whatever—in Guangdong and maybe elsewhere too. People celebrated the end of the outbreak, but those best informed celebrated most guardedly. SARS-CoV wasn’t gone, it was only hiding. It could return. In late December, it did. Like an aftershock to a quake, a new case broke in Guangdong. Soon afterward, three more. One patient was a waitress who had been exposed to a civet. On January 5, 2004, the day the first case was confirmed, Guangdong authorities reversed policy again, ordering the death and disposal of every masked palm civet held at a farm or a market in the province. Wild civets were another question, left unanswered.

Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak, researchers suspect, was a 2-year-old boy who died on Dec. 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Guéckédou, in southeastern Guinea. Bordering Sierra Leone and Liberia, Guéckédou is at the intersection of three nations, where the disease found an easy entry point to the region. A week later, it killed the boy’s mother, then his 3-year-old sister, then his grandmother. All had fever, vomiting and diarrhea, but no one knew what had sickened them.

President Barack Obama declared the disease to be “a threat to global security”. The worsening outbreak could lead to “profound political, economic and security implications for all of us”. The U.S., said Obama, will now play a broader role in combatting the disease, deploying 3,000 troops to assist in relief efforts. Washington’s role will involve the building of healthcare facilities, the training of healthcare workers, providing home health care kits

Since that time there have been numerous epidemics of the disease. In 1889 and 1890 the disease was epidemic over practically the entire civilized world. Three years later there was another flare-up of the disease. Both times the epidemic spread widely over the United States. Although the recent epidemic is called ‘Spanish influenza,’ investigation has shown that it did not originate in Spain.  We now know that there was an undue prevalence of influenza in the United States for several years preceding the recent great pandemic. Because the disease occurred in mild form, and because the public mind was focused on the war, this increased prevalence of the disease escaped attention. Not until the epidemic appeared in severe form in Boston in September, 1918, did it excite any special interest.” - U.S. Public Health Service Report, prepared by Surgeon General Rupert Blue

When there was an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa in 2014, PEPFAR-recipient countries, including Nigeria, Uganda, and Congo, were able to contain the crisis because their PEPFAR-funded labs quickly identified the disease and trained and provided health-care workers with the capacity to intervene. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and other countries that had not been part of PEPFAR because of their low rates of HIV/AIDS infection lacked the labs and health systems necessary to detect the Ebola outbreak and thus initially were unable to contain it.

occasional outbreaks of those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics will be unpredictable. And the market aberrations produced by them will be equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree. Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. Our goal is more modest: we simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

Whatever their place of origin, diseases came in waves, one after the other, with deadly results. Smallpox, the most lethal, killed up to 90% of infected peoples during epidemics in the 1770s, 1800–1801, 1838 and 1862–1803.94 Malaria took a comparable death toll along the lower Columbia and Willamette Valley in 1830–1833, followed by outbreaks of measles, flu, and dysentery.

massive outbreak of an engineered, highly contagious, highly deadly virus would not only excuse martial law to “limit the spread of the disease”, it would eliminate millions, if not ultimately billions of humans from the planet.

Blaming certain groups for outbreaks is not a new phenomenon. In the sixteenth century, the English believed syphilis came from France, so referred to it as the ‘French pox’. The French, believing it to be from Naples, called it the ‘Neopolitan disease’. In Russia, it was the Polish disease, in Poland it was Turkish, and in Turkey it was Christian.[75]

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

The significance of the concept, Lloyd-Smith and his coauthors noted, is that if superspreaders exist and can be identified during a disease outbreak, then control measures should be targeted at isolating those individuals, rather than applied more broadly and diffusely across an entire population. Conversely, if you quarantine forty-nine infectious patients but miss one, and that one is a superspreader, your control efforts have failed and you face an epidemic.

God is giving the world in the coronavirus outbreak, as in all other calamities, a physical picture of the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of God-belittling sin... Here’s my suggestion: God put the physical world under a curse so that the physical horrors we see around us in diseases and calamities would become a vivid picture of how horrible sin is. In other words, physical evil is a parable, a drama, a signpost pointing to the moral outrage of rebellion against God... Calamities are God’s previews of what sin deserves and will one day receive in judgment a thousand times worse. They are warnings. They are wake-up calls to see the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of sin against God.

Never mind the recovered and immune members of the population; they just represented padding and interference so far as disease propagation was concerned. Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected.

Why was there still no Ebola vaccine after more than 20 outbreaks of the disease since it was discovered in 1976?

The hatred is not a feeling; it is a poisoning disease of mental and heart. One should eliminate before it outbreaks since it undermines the prestige, pride, and national image.

There are three different types of influenza viruses: A, B, and C. Type C rarely causes disease in humans. Type B does cause disease, but not epidemics. Only influenza A viruses cause epidemics or pandemics, an epidemic being a local or national outbreak, a pandemic a worldwide one.

wars have been seen as progenitors of deadly outbreaks of infectious disease

In addition to the devastating ravages of capitalism, rural England in late Victorian times suffered a series of terrible natural calamities. In 1865–6 and 1877 outbreaks of cattle plague (rinderpest) and pleuropneumonia were so severe that the government had to restrict the movement of cattle and pay compensation to the owners of slaughtered beasts to check the spread of infection.8 A run of wet seasons from 1878 to 1882 produced an epidemic of liver-rot in sheep in Somerset, north Dorset and the Lincolnshire marshes – 4 million sheep were lost in the period.9 The floods caused wipe-out for many arable farmers. Foot-and-mouth disease raged, out of control, through British livestock from 1881 to 1883. Wheat and wool – the two staples of English and Welsh prosperity since the Middle Ages – fell into the hands of overseas markets.10

The outbreak of a disease doesn’t mean your life should come to a halt and your health should suffer. You should continue exercising and eating well. Get good sleep. Use relaxation techniques and listen to the experts and health care providers

Coming to Grips with Foodborne Infection: Peanut Butter, Peppers and Nationwide Salmonella Outbreaks.” New England Journal of Medicine 360, no. 10 (2009): 949–53.

All governments must invest in adequate, country-wide disease surveillance and early reporting systems which feed information from the grass roots to WHO’s Outbreak and Emergencies Programme. In reality, to succeed this will require economic incentives for early reporting, and assurances from WHO that reporting will not result in trade and travel restrictions without justification (a fear that led governments to downplay the extent of the Ebola outbreak in 2014).

This outbreak has exposed so many different things. It has exposed the rudimentary level of so many Chinese officials, and it has exposed the diseases running rampant through the very fabric of our society. These are diseases that are much more evil and tenacious than the novel coronavirus. Moreover, there is no cure in sight. That is because there are no doctors willing to treat this disease.

The 2009 experience should reassure no one. It seems likely that throughout history many such outbreaks occurred but escaped notice; only modern surveillance and molecular biology allowed us to recognize it as a pandemic. When the Washington Post asked Tom Frieden, then head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, what scared him the most, what kept him up at night, he replied, “The biggest concern is always for an influenza pandemic . . . [It] really is the worst-case scenario.” So where are we now? What are the lessons?

Richard felt that they should not paint too black a picture, and that in any case there was no proof of contagion since the relatives of his patients were still unaffected. ‘But others have died,’ Rieux pointed out. ‘And, of course, contagion is never absolute, because if it were, we should have endless exponential growth and devastating loss of population. It’s not a matter of painting a black picture; it’s a matter of taking precautions.’ However, Richard thought he could sum the situation up by saying that if they were to halt the disease, assuming it did not stop of its own accord, they had to apply the serious preventive health measures provided for in law; that, to do so, they would have to acknowledge officially that there was an outbreak of plague; that there was no absolute certainty on that score; and consequently that they should consider the matter.

The second news-making event in the matter of epidemic diseases was the outbreak of plague in the Indian states of Gujarat and Maharashtra in September and October 1994.

The third major epidemic shock of the 1990s was an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (later called Ebola virus disease, or just Ebola) in the city of Kikwit, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), in 1995.

SARS presented many of the features that most severely expose the vulnerabilities of the global system. It is a respiratory disease capable of spreading from person to person without a vector; it has an asymptomatic incubation period of more than a week; it generates symptoms that closely resemble those of other diseases; it takes a heavy toll on caregivers and hospital staff; it spreads easily and silently by air travel; and it has a CFR of 10 percent. Moreover, at the time it appeared, its causative pathogen (SARS-associated coronavirus) was unknown, and there was neither a diagnostic test nor a specific treatment. For all of these reasons, it dramatically confirmed the IOM’s 1992 prediction that all countries were more vulnerable than ever to emerging infectious diseases. SARS demonstrated no predilection for any region of the world and was no respecter of prosperity, education, technology, or access to health care. Indeed, after its outbreak in China, SARS spread by airplane primarily to affluent cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Toronto, where it struck relatively prosperous travelers and their contacts and hospital workers, patients, and their visitors rather than the poor and the marginalized. More

These changes have not come upon our world from without. No meteorite from outer space has struck our planet; there have been no overwhelming outbreaks of volcanic violence or strange epidemic diseases; the sun has not flared up to excessive heat or suddenly shrunken to plunge us into Arctic winter. The changes have come through men themselves.

Inevitably, the British barrier ringing Boston created new hardships for residents. While initially forbidden to leave the city, new food shortages sweltering summer temperatures convinced Gage to grant some citizens passes. ...Even after the arrival of fishing boats civilians could not buy the catch until the British were supplied. Outbreaks of disease became common.

Caves are classic convergence zones where cross-species viral jumps occur. Bats and their guano, sheltering mammals, human hunters all passing in and out of a confined, humid, temperature-neutral space. Diseases love to make the first big leap from animal to human in caverns. Did you know the first major Ebola outbreak was ultimately traced back to a single cave in central Africa?

One was that, as live viruses, the attenuated Sabin poliovirus strains always possessed the potential to revert by mutation to virulence and neurotropism, leading to outbreaks of “vaccine-associated paralytic polio.” This possibility—that the vaccine itself would unleash epidemic disease—is not simply theoretical. Outbreaks of vaccine-associated polio occurred in the Philippines (2001), Madagascar (2002), China (2004), and Indonesia (2005).

Partisanship had grown so fierce even treatments for the disease became politicized. There were now “Republican” and “Federalist” cures. Jeffersonian Benjamin Rush, acknowledged the finest doctor in town if not the country, used the time-honored if incorrect practices of bleeding and purging. Alexander Hamilton and his family were stricken just when an old friend from Nevis, Dr. Edward Stevens, was visiting. A veteran of “Yellow Jack” outbreaks in the Caribbean, Stevens administered large doses of “Peruvian bark”—quinine—laced with burnt cinnamon and a nightcap of laudanum. The treatment worked, but Rush, an ardent Republican, dismissed it and went right on bleeding patients, which Stevens believed medieval. Rush’s backyard was soon so drenched with blood that he indirectly began to breed countless flies, while his property gave off a “sickening sweet stench” to passersby.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them. How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years?

By listing Disease X, an undetermined disease, the WHO is acknowledging that outbreaks do not always come from an identified source and that, as it admits, “a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease”.

With the first rays of dawn coming from a huge orange sun, rising out of the Indian Ocean from the East, the Dominion Monarch passed the Durban bluffs and entered the protected harbor. A police boat escorted the ship in and stood by as it was secured. Everybody crowded close to the railings and looked down onto the concrete dock. From the ship you could see that there were police cars blocking the entry to the wharf area and it became quite apparent that something was amiss. The reason was soon made clear when the loudspeakers announced that before clearing the ship, everyone on board would be required to get a smallpox vaccination or present their international immunization card, to verify that they were in compliance. There had been an outbreak of smallpox and yellow fever throughout Africa especially in the Cape Province and in tribal areas. During the previous year, nearby Northern Rhodesia had reported several thousand cases of these diseases. The police boat lay in wait, until every last one of the passengers was immunized. It took hours, however everyone was happy when the health officials finally came aboard to do the vaccinating. Finally the announcement came that the ship was cleared so that we could go ashore. Not until then did the band strike up and play “God Save the King.

The rationing system that was set up in Britain at the outbreak of the hostilities was as revolutionary as anything the Communists could have dreamed up. Almost every basic item of food was rationed , as were other essentials such as clothing and household goods. Nobody was entitled to more food if they were richer, or of a higher social standing than their neighbors -the only people entitled to better rations were those in the armed forces, or those in occupations that required heavy physical labour. As a consequence, the general health of the population actually improved (italics) during the war: by the late 1940's infant mortality rates in England were in steady decline, and deaths from a variety of disease had also dropped substantially since the prewar years. From the standpoint of public health, the war made Britain a much fairer society. There were other changes in Britain during the war that had a similar effect, such as the introduction of conscription to people of all classes, and both sexes. "Social and sexual distinctions were swept away.' wrote Theodora FitzGibbon. 'and when a dramatic change such as that takes place, it never goes back quite in the same way.

Domestic violence is just as much a quality-of-life and liberty for community, social, and legal attention to support mental, emotional, health, wellness & physical safety as any other epidemic outbreak; only this illness has an anger managed, self-controlled, personal boundary-respecting, and accountability-subjective cure!

In the countryside, an outbreak of plague usually lasted about six months and then faded away. In cities and other places where people lived in very crowded conditions—including monasteries and schools—the disease lasted much longer, often diminishing in the winter only to reappear in the spring.

Beyond the cultural differences that must be bridged in any international effort, combined with factors of national politics, priorities, and values, we continue to grapple with the essential paradox of public health that began our discussion: when the system is working effectively, it is a silent venture and there are relatively few outbreaks of disease. These very successes lead most of us down a complacent path of false confidence, apathy, and assumptions that the endless dance is over. To complicate matters further, microbes themselves are hardly monolithic or permanently settled beings. For every attempt we make to destroy or weaken them, they respond with an equal and opposite force. The goal of both sides is to assume leadership of the evolutionary waltz ever in progress.

As will be observed, beginning with the Black Death, plague outbreaks were more likely than not to occur during or immediately following years of depressed tree growth and inferior

With the first rays of dawn coming from a huge orange sun, rising out of the Indian Ocean from the East, the Dominion Monarch passed the Durban bluffs and entered the protected harbor. A police boat escorted the ship in and stood by as it was secured. Everybody crowded close to the railings and looked down onto the concrete dock. From the ship you could see that there were police cars blocking the entry to the wharf area and it became quite apparent that something was amiss. The reason was soon made clear when the loudspeakers announced that before clearing the ship, everyone on board would be required to get a smallpox vaccination or present their international immunization card, to verify that they were in compliance. There had been an outbreak of smallpox and yellow fever throughout Africa especially in the Cape Province and in tribal areas. During the previous year, nearby Northern Rhodesia had reported several thousand cases of these diseases. It took hours, however everyone was happy when the health officials finally came aboard to do the vaccinating. The police boat lay in wait, until every last one of the passengers was immunized. Finally the announcement came that the ship was cleared so that we could go ashore. Not until then did the band strike up and play “God Save the King.

Wayna Qhapaq died in the first smallpox epidemic. The virus struck Tawantinsuyu again in 1533, 1535, 1558, and 1565. Each time the consequences were beyond the imagination of our fortunate age. “They died by scores and hundreds,” recalled one eyewitness to the 1565 outbreak. “Villages were depopulated. Corpses were scattered over the fields or piled up in the houses or huts.… The fields were uncultivated; the herds were untended [and] the price of food rose to such an extent that many persons found it beyond their reach. They escaped the foul disease, but only to be wasted by famine.

Coronavirus affects not only humans, but also animals as well. That is a fact as seen from around the world both in the wild and in enclosed habitats like zoos. Cats, dogs, minks, tigers, hyenas, hippos, leopards, just to name a few. There also seems to be direct correlation to outbreaks of avian flu, but the so called experts seem to think there is no coincidence between the two. I beg to differ. The avian outbreaks seem to occur within so called coronavirus hot spots. That is a coincidence to big to rule out. Captive birds like chickens have close contact with man, so there may be something there, but wild birds usually shun man. That means there must be another cause. Sewerage outflows can carry the corona virus to low water areas where wild birds drink, bathe and eat. As I have said, it is a too big a coincidence to rule out. Let's hope I'm wrong, but I just have that feeling...

That is, the psychological effects of the next pandemic will likely be more pronounced, more widespread, and longer-lasting than the purely somatic effects of infection.

Research indicates unrealistic optimism and related traits—including the sense of invulnerability and the blunting cognitive style—may be associated with low levels of pandemic-related anxiety and nonadherence to hygiene and other health recommendations. People who score highly on such traits would be particularly likely to spread contagion during a pandemic.

But many other people will fail to adhere to the recommendations of health authorities. These people will engage in seeming self-defeating behaviors such as refusing to get vaccinated, if a vaccine is available. These people will refuse to stay home when they are sick. They will spread infection to other people.

Overall, the research suggests that conspiracy theories appeal to people who seek accuracy or meaning about personally important issues, but lack the cognitive resources or have other problems that prevent them from finding the answers to questions by more rational means

Ethnic minority groups and HCWs will likely be targets of discrimination. We will see a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Someone or some organization or agency will be blamed, rightly or wrongly. The news media will sensationalize the pandemic, despite admonishments to engage in more balanced reporting. Unfounded rumors and fake news will spread rapidly throughout the Internet. Heath authorities will struggle to contain rumors and to debunk conspiracy theories.

Given the intense isolation that nations are now likely to experience when they disclose that they’re host to a menacing outbreak of a novel disease, and the economic repercussions they’ll incur, we can expect countries to adjust their behaviors. They’ll be even more reluctant to reveal the existence of a new pathogen or to share strains and sequence information

Anti-vaccination movements are high-pressure, highly conformist organizations in which dissenting views are discouraged. To the extent that people reject science because they wish to present a self-image as critical and skeptical, it can be useful to communicate to them the inherently skeptical nature of science and to portray antiscientific thinking as an example of unthinking conformity (Hornsey & Fielding, 2017).

The law required the CDC to “establish a near real-time electronic nationwide public health situational awareness capability through an interoperable network of systems to share data and information to enhance early detection of rapid response to, and management of, potentially catastrophic infectious disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies that originate domestically or abroad.”30 As Levin observed, “the simplest way to describe the CDC’s response to this binding legal mandate was that it just ignored it. It did nothing.

Later, in 2006, Congress appropriated funds to improve the CDC’s system for detecting and reporting on novel threats, directing the agency to “establish a near real-time electronic nationwide public health situational awareness capability” to “share data and information to enhance early detection of rapid response to, and management of, potentially catastrophic infectious disease outbreaks”; but the CDC never implemented the called-for changes.

The “blood vomit” disease also sounds very similar to the effects caused by the Ebola virus. Several outbreaks of this virus have occurred since 1993 such as in 2000, 2001, 2004, and 2007. In fact, there have been more outbreaks of Ebola since 1993 than in all previous years. In this time period there were 18 known outbreaks that killed over 1,000 people. The mortality rate is staggering with the disease, which kills between 51%-83% of those who become infected. If this pathogen mutates so that it is more easily transmissible the world could have another Black Death on its hands. A global death toll between 51%-83% would not be the end of the world but would certainly be the end of the world as we know it.

The reluctance or frank refusal to have oneself or one’s dependents vaccinated—euphemistically known as “vaccine hesitancy”—has been identified by the WHO (2019) as one of the top ten global health threats.

When threat is high but perceived efficacy is low, defensive reactions are likely, such as denying the severity of, or susceptibility to, the threat (e.g., disparaging government health warnings) (Goldenberg & Arndt, 2008). The risk needs to be perceived as credible (i.e., not over- or understated) and the preventive or protective measures also need to be perceived as credible.

People with high levels of health anxiety sometimes regard clinics as a source of sickness rather than a resource for help.

Evidence suggests that the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories is driven by motives that can be characterized as epistemic (needing to understand one’s environment), existential (needing to feel safe and in control of one’s environment), and social (needing to maintain a positive image of oneself and one’s in-group) (Douglas et al., 2017).

Conspiracy theories tend to be particularly appealing to people who find the positive image of their self or in-group to be threatened