Best Epidemiology Quotes & Sayings

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding - a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths. — Peter Watts

We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right? — Seth Godin

Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene. — Sam Harris

Epidemiology is like a bikini: what is revealed is interesting; what is concealed is crucial. — Peter Duesberg

Clinical descriptions and Epidemiology — Ann M. Kring

A recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed 123,216 subjects over fourteen years and found that men who spent more than 6 hours a day sitting were 17 percent more likely to die during that time than men who sat for less than 3 hours. For women, the increased risk of death was 34 percent. This increased mortality persisted regardless of whether the participants smoked, were overweight, and - this shocked me - regardless of how much they exercised. Humans aren't built to sit all day. — Scott Jurek

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. — Richard Dawkins

The vast preponderance of evidence in modern epidemiology shows that those who eat more whole plant foods and fewer animal products and processed foods have lower rates of chronic disease and longer lifespans. — Joel Fuhrman

Whether epidemiology alone can, in strict logic, ever prove causality, even in this modern sense, may be questioned, but the same must also be said of laboratory experiments on animals. - Richard Doll — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I'll bet you a six-pack of Coors that pretty soon, people will be discovering Cretaceous parasites inside Cretaceous bones. The possibility of looking into epidemiology and pathology is pretty cool. — Robert T. Bakker

How do you react when your own government lies to you systematically about life-and-death questions? As I have noted earlier, the answer is political action in the state legislatures, and one weapon in the hands of the public is an understanding of the pseudo-science and pseudo-epidemiology represented by articles like this one. — Harris L Coulter

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. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

By any reasonable standard of proof, the combination of human epidemiology and track-analysis demonstrates that there is no threshold dose or dose-rate below which "repair" invariably prevents health harm. — John Gofman