A Pandemic Quotes & Sayings

The influenza pandemic of 1918 may well be the greatest scourge ever to afflict humanity, exacting a death toll greater than all the wars of the 20th Century combined. The virus that wreaked this havoc apparently developed in birds, and then jumped to people. In other words, it was avian flu. — David L. Katz

Our failure to deal with the subconscious and our tendency to blame others adds up to an inability to take responsibility for our lives. The feeling of powerlessness - and eventually hopelessness - that this engenders is an emotional cancer. If the Center for Disease Control dealt with emotional plagues, this stressful state of mind would be judged a pandemic. But this delusional state of mind is shared by nearly everyone, so it is regarded as normal. — Jim Nourse

Grave security concerns can arise as a result of demographic trends, chronic poverty, economic inequality, environmental degradation, pandemic diseases, organized crime, repressive governance and other developments no state can control alone. Arms can't address such concerns. — Ban Ki-moon

Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion ... Nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command. — Laurie Garrett

If a severe pandemic materializes, all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us. — Irwin Redlener

It takes a variety of strategies and initiatives to address this pandemic. It's about life and death and the survival of humanity. — Barbara Lee

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there. — William Gibson

One is that if women's sexuality in Africa wasn't under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren't subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn't have a pandemic. — Stephen Lewis

Pelvic organ prolapse is not an American women's health concern, it is a global women's health pandemic. — Sherrie J. Palm

Shit, oh dear! Leave it to the government to turn a pandemic into an epic horror movie. The — P. Mark DeBryan

I'm not studying the heroes who lead navies - and armies - and win wars. I'm studying ordinary people who you wouldn't expect to be heroic, but who, when there's a crisis, show extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice. Like Jenna Geidel, who gave her life vaccinating people during the Pandemic. And the fishermen and retired boat owners and weekend sailors who rescued the British Army from Dunkirk. And Wells Crowther, the twenty-four-year-old equities trader who worked in the World Trade Center. When it was hit by terrorists, he could have gotten out, but instead he went back and saved ten people, and died. I'm going to observe six different sets of heroes in six different situations to try to determine what qualities they have in common. — Connie Willis

Ascribing personal responsibility to the obese individual is not a rational argument for an eminently practical reason: it fails to advance any efforts to change it. The obesity pandemic is due to our altered biochemistry, which is a result of our altered environment. — Robert H. Lustig

For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour. — Margaret Chan

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy. Other — Peter Singer

You can't put a price tag on preparation for a pandemic. — Richard E. Besser

Masterpieces of art possess immense potential to advance a worldview that could help assuage the societal terrors posed by globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism. — Martin Filler

For a pandemic of moderate severity, this is one of our greatest challenges: helping people to understand when they do not need to worry, and when they do need to seek urgent care. — Margaret Chan

There's so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it. — Annie Lennox

In fact, the early demographer Thomas Malthus believes that the only way the human population would ever check itself was by running headlong into a disaster, like a pandemic or famine. Sometimes we get so frustrated with the slowness of human political processes that we wish a giant flaming rock would solve the problem for us. — Annalee Newitz

There is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic. — Billy Corgan

Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent. — Alan Huffman

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. — Jennifer Gardy

If we can provide even a few months of early warning for just one pandemic, the benefits will outweigh all the time and energy we're devoting. Imagine preventing health crises, not just responding to them. — Nathan Wolfe

Seasonal flu is now a pandemic that lasts for years and years because you've got so many people that it's jumping back between northern and southern hemispheres and moving itself around the world. By the time it gets back to where it started, it's changed sufficiently so that people are no longer immune. — Nathan Wolfe

If we do the kind of common-sense public health measures we know work, we ought to be able to stop it from being a global pandemic,. — Julie Gerberding

After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic. — Margaret Chan

Thank you, Sick Husband, because what I mistakenly thought was just your cold with a minor fever is apparently something closer to onset Black Plague with a side of liver disease. According to your indications, you're presenting pandemic symptoms from Europe, circa 1300 AD. We should alert the CDC! I mean, sure, I pulled off carpool, dinner, homework tutoring, and four kids' practices last week when I had strep and the flu, but you just stay in bed with your scratchy throat. We don't want to infect the children. — Jen Hatmaker

Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague, — Margaret Atwood

What is the luck of the draw that me - me - who finally writes a book, it comes out in the - in the - in the time, in the center of the first pandemic, H1N1? And I'm going out on signings, and I'm going out to the public. This is the one time when I need to be hermetically sealed. — Howie Mandel

R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. — David Quammen

The pandemic of AIDS is a gender-based disease. — Stephen Lewis

Recent breakthroughs in science show we have just the capacities we need to face our planet's challenges. We're "soft-wired" for cooperation, empathy, fairness, along with a deep need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm put it. My hunch is that one reason depression is a global pandemic is that the dominant mental map denies so many of us expression of these deep needs and capacities. — Frances Moore Lappe

That makes climate change a bigger public health problem than AIDS, than malaria, than pandemic flu. — Lois Capps

The division into hundreds of countries whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease and who knows what else, and flourish beyond the twenty-first century. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence. — Brian Cox

I liken kissing baby cheeks to kissing stripper boobies. They're both irresistible, but you're bound to catch something. Scientists say there's at least an 18% chance that the world's next deadly viral pandemic is brewing in the saliva stew of a chubby baby's cheeks, or a stripper's boobies, at this very moment. — J. Matthew Nespoli

A pandemic influenza would mean widespread infection essentially throughout every region of the world. — Anthony Fauci

It could be said that the AIDS pandemic is a classic own-goal scored by the human race against itself. — Anne, Queen Of Great Britain

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience. — Neel Burton

There is no governing structure for a pandemic, and little more than vague political pressure to ensure limited access to life-sparing tools and medicines for more than half the world population. — Laurie Garrett

Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope. — Annalee Newitz

Explosive Pandemic-type zombies mostly spread the contagion through wounding or biting humans, and in that way, the increase their numbers. Because they multiply so quickly and explosively, they can destroy all human civilization in a very short time. For this reason, will refer to them as Explosive Pandemic-type zombies.

The person responsible for Explosive Pandemic-type zombies is none other than George A Romero, who created them in 1968 Night of the Living Dead. — Sakazaki Freddie

Chucky become a pandemic part of pop culture, definitely. — David Kirschner

When we can get the incidence of HIV down enough to turn the trajectory of the pandemic, it will assume a momentum of its own in diminishing HIV. — Anthony Fauci

The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film. — Annalee Newitz