Zoonotics Quotes

“We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies.

Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Delta was a mutation of the Wuhan virus.
Omicron was an enhancement of the Wuhan virus.
-Think about the wording. Think about the origin.-”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“The origins are soon forgotten when their is war on the dinner table.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Zoonotics seem to be in the news for one reason or another of late.
From coronavirus (covid-19), bird flu (H5N1) and now monkeypox.
So called scientists say there is no connection.
Yet, the bird flu followed covid 19 hotspots.
Monkpox shows snd attacks some of the same human areas as covid-19 does.
Coincidence?
I don't think so.
It's time that we looked more closely at how these zoonotics may interact and why yet share a passion for the same areas of human sickness.
Sure. there may be no connection, but what if there is?
Yesterday and tomorrow have a connection to today. It's the same thing.
We need to look at the areas that these zoonotics attack. What they protein source (food) is. Where they have been predominately found and how would the map overlay plot their outbreaks.
The connection is there.
We just need to look.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Zoonotics seem to be in the hews for one or another reason of late.
From coronavirus (covid-19), bird flu (H5N1) and now monkeypox.
Scientists say that there are no connections between them, yet bird flu turned up in coronavirus hotspots around the globe.
Monkeypox attacks the same areas as covid.
Coincidence?
I don't think so.
It's time that we looked more closely at how these zoonotics work and why they share a penchant for the same human body areas.
There may be no connection, but what if there is.
It's like yesterday and tomorrow. They are both separate, but they are connected by a thing called, today.
We should look at what is their food source. That is, the proteins in our bodies that they feed off. We should also map out the areas to see where they overlap.
With monkeypox we should also look at what vaccines were administered just in case there is a connection there as well.
I know that there is a connection there somewhere. All we have to do is look at what may be possible.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Monkeypox!
Where's the connection?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Even with all that is happening on the world stage at present, we should not forget the origins of the coronavirus.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“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

“Computational models of infectious disease can make all the difference in our response to pandemics. As habitat loss and climate change make zoonotic spillover events increasingly more likely, COVID-19 is almost certainly not the last major pandemic of the 21st century.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease: With Applications in Python