Julie

“What Casanova’s finding meant was that, regardless of their culture, diet, social status or income, one in 10,000 people are particularly vulnerable to flu–a vulnerability that they inherit from their parents.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“It was a fascinating hint that flu might have a heritable component, but other studies failed to replicate the finding. Then in January 2011, in the midst of the annual flu season in France, a two-year-old girl was admitted to the intensive care unit of the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, suffering from ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). Doctors saved her life, and one of them, Jean-Laurent Casanova, sequenced her genome. He wanted to know if it held the key to why an otherwise healthy child had nearly died of a disease that most children shrug off. It turned out that the girl had inherited a genetic defect that meant she was unable to produce interferon, that all-important first-line defence against viruses. As a result, her besieged immune system went straight to plan B: a massive inflammatory response similar to the one pathologists saw in 1918.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Cordon sanitaire. Isolation. Quarantine. These are age-old concepts that human beings have been putting into practice since long before they understood the nature of the agents of contagion, long before they even considered epidemics to be acts of God. In fact, we may have had strategies for distancing ourselves from sources of infection since before we were strictly human.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“It was believed that all creation came from thought, language, and mathematics.”
― Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew