Epidemiology Quotes

“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’.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“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.”
― Ben Goldacre, I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

“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!”
― Gary Wobeser

“In the post-Covid world, the mathematics of chaos theory will experience a greater relevancy as it is applied across a broader set of science disciplines, especially epidemiology, precision medicine and climate science. - Tom Golway”
― Tom Golway

“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, It's Catching: The Infectious World of Germs and Microbes

“How do you know?" Red repeated each word slowly, enunciating every consonant. "If the CDC brewed up something in their lab and it accidentally was let loose in the world, do you think they would tell you?”
― Christina Henry, The Girl in Red

“[...] I’m very grateful to all the many companies and people who, by their optimistically bad behaviour under fire, have given narrative colour to what might otherwise have been some very dry explanations of basic statistical principles.”
― Ben Goldacre, I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

“Over the course of 2021/2022 we will see the current transformation initiatives and innovation around supply chains being applied to the science of #epidemiology to track the journey and morphing of infectious diseases. #COVID19 #PrecisionMedicine - Tom Golway”
― Tom Golway

“Epidemiology is an ever evolving science since predictive models have significant sensitive dependencies on initial assumptions - Tom Golway”
― Tom Golway

“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.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“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.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“MARV serves as a poignant example of the way a pathogen that is highly prevalent in its reservoir host population can hide safely without human notice, until in some unfortunate accident, hosts and vectors cross paths.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“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.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python

“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.”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

“The work of epidemiology is related to unanswered questions, but also to unquestioned answers.”
― Patricia Buffler

“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.”
― K. Lee Lerner, Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security, 3 volume set

“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.”
― K. Lee Lerner, Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security, 3 volume set

“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.”
― K. Lee Lerner, Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security, 3 volume set