Pandemic Quotes

“Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.53”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“In the nineteenth century, cholera struck the most modern, prosperous cities in the world, killing rich and poor alike, from Paris and London to New York City and New Orleans. In 1836, it felled King Charles X in Italy; in 1849, President James Polk in New Orleans; in 1893, the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“Unlike acts of war or catastrophic storms, pandemic-causing pathogens don’t build trust and facilitate cooperative defenses. On the contrary, due to the peculiar psychic experience of new pathogens, they’re more likely to breed suspicion and mistrust among us, destroying social bonds as surely as they destroy bodies.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“City officials may have destroyed evidence of the arrival of cholera-infected ships in the weeks before the outbreak, too. Following up on claims made by the port physician that the city had secretly quarantined passengers from a cholera-infected ship, investigators found that otherwise intact quarantine-hospital records for the months in question—April, May, and June 1832—had disappeared.50 * * * To be fair, the choices that nineteenth-century leaders had to make about whether or not to implement disease control strategies were not between two equally compelling options. The choices were between predictable costs and unpredictable benefits. They knew that quarantines and alerting the public about cholera would disrupt private interests, but they couldn’t be sure that either strategy would actually protect the public. It’s not surprising, then, that they opted for near-certain private benefits rather than mostly uncertain public ones. Plus they were under no obligation to do otherwise.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“An outbreak of vaccine-preventable measles that began in Disneyland over winter holidays in 2014 spread into seven states, exposing thousands to the contagion. Between 1996 and 2011, the United States experienced fifteen such outbreaks.17”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“Partly, this sense of an impending pandemic derives from the increasing number of candidate pathogens with the biological capacity to cause one. But it’s also a reflection of the shortcomings in our public-health infrastructure, modes of international cooperation, and ability to maintain social cohesion in the face of contagion.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“Many of the institutions of modern society, after all, are designed to enhance our natural capacities for cooperation, by punishing non-cooperators and encouraging the rest of us to pursue even relatively mundane collective actions, like paying taxes and getting flu shots. And so, when pandemics unfold, it's not just because peculiarly aggressive pathogens have exploited passively oblivious victims or because we've inadvertently provided them with ample transmission opportunities. It's also because our deeply rooted, highly nuanced capacity for cooperative action failed.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond

“But far from being a harmless source of fertilizer, dog feces is both an environmental contaminant (and is classified as such by the Environmental Protection Agency) and a source of pathogens that can infect people. Like human excreta, dog poo teems with pathogenic microbes, such as strains of E. coli, roundworms, and other parasites. One of the most common parasitic infections in Americans is the result of their exposure to dog feces. The dog roundworm Toxocara canis is common in dogs and, because of the ubiquity of dog feces, widespread in the environment. It can contaminate soil and water for years.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“the global bonfire of fossil fuels will heighten the likelihood of pandemics on its own, in a way that is likely to be even more consequential than all of its contributing factors put together.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“In the past, pathogens have ripped through societies, exploiting our politics and ways of living, moving, and connecting with one another as efficiently and fatally as the novel coronavirus has today—some even more so. But even as they left deep imprints and jagged scars on our bodies and societies, we did not change our ways of life to shut them out, even when we could.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“In the past, pathogens have ripped through societies, exploiting our politics and ways of living, moving, and connecting with one another as efficiently and fatally as the novel coronavirus has today—some even more so. But even as they left deep imprints and jagged scars on our bodies and societies, we did not change our ways of life to shut them out, even when we could. On the contrary, almost as soon as the heat of contagion lifted, we resumed doing the same things we’d done before. Then, as now, we imagined pandemics to be as unfathomable and unpredictable as being struck by lightning. We cast them as acts of foreign aggression. We”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“Many experts believe that a cholera-like pandemic looms. In a survey by the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, 90 percent of epidemiologists said that a pandemic that will sicken 1 billion, kill up to 165 million, and trigger a global recession that could cost up to $3 trillion would occur sometime in the next two generations.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“Early notice makes possible all kinds of more efficient containment and mitigation. We could prevent some epidemics and more effectively prepare to withstand others. But even if such a global surveillance system can be built, it will work only if it translates into people actually using the information to do something about it.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“the virtual elimination of infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life,” the virologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet wrote in 1951.2 “To write about infectious disease,” he added in 1962, “is almost to write of something that has passed into history.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all. —Albert Camus”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“As avian diversity declined in the United States, specialist species like woodpeckers and rails disappeared, while generalist species like American robins and crows boomed. (Populations of American robins have grown by 50 to 100 percent over the past twenty-five years.)48 This reordering of the composition of the local bird population steadily increased the chances that the virus would reach a high enough concentration to spill over into humans.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“Particular variants in our pathogen-recognition genes, which protected us from ancient epidemics, correlate with a range of autoimmune disorders, from diabetes and multiple sclerosis to lupus.27”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond

“a single opossum, through grooming, destroyed nearly six thousand ticks a week.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond