Thoughts on epidemics

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If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s highly likely to be a highly-infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, microbes.
—Bill Gates, TED Talks, 2015

The people in power have created an obesity epidemic.
—Robert Atkins

Raising awareness versus raising alarm; the public can’t be better informed if the information isn’t better.
—TK Naliaka

The coronavirus pandemic is a world-changing event, like 9/11. There was a world before Covid-19. And there will be a world after Covid-19. But it won’t be the same.
—Oliver Markus Malloy

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.
—Jill Lepore

Ebola has shown that the world is not ready to deal with an epidemic on this scale.
—Alpha Conde

It’s striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.
—Jared Diamond

We need to think of chronic disease, hypertension, cancer, like H1N1. In fact, there’s an epidemic
of chronic disease.
—Patrick Soon-Shiong

In spite of all the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.
—Christian de Duve

Epidemics on the other side of the world are a threat to us all. No epidemic is just local.
—Peter Piot

War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.
—Pearl S Buck

The three golden rules of COVID-19: 1) Isolate. 2) Isolate. 3) Isolate.
—Steven Magee