How to Survive a Pandemic Quotes

“Most Americans don’t realize that our poultry supply is contaminated with fecal matter. Delmer Jones, past president of the U.S. Meat Inspection Union, described USDA labels as misleading to the public. He suggested, “The label should declare that the product has been contaminated with fecal material.”560 Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation proposed a more straight-forward approach: “There is shit in the meat.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“In 1918, the virus didn’t learn how to kill humans crowded in filthy chicken sheds. Instead, it may have gotten that education in the trenches of World War I. In 1918, the soldiers may have been the chickens.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Highly pathogenic bird flu viruses are primarily the products of factory farming.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“The National Academy of Sciences once estimated that a total ban on the widespread feeding of antibiotics to farm animals would raise the price of poultry anywhere from one to two cents per pound and the price of pork or beef around three to six cents a pound, costing the average meat-eating American consumer up to $9.72 a year.1357 Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States cost an estimated $30 billion every year1358 and kill ninety thousand people.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“With few, if any, new classes of antibiotics in clinical development,674 an expert on antibiotic resistance at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy warned that “we’re sacrificing a future where antibiotics will work for treating sick people by squandering them today for animals that are not sick at all.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being “harvested” and then being “processed” in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat. For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better.3513”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“And each flu season, children kill their grandparents.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Lessons can be learned from past pandemics. In 1918, as Boston hospitals filled beyond capacity, a tent hospital was set up in nearby Brookline. Though exposing ailing patients to the chilly Boston autumn was condemned by Bostonians as “barbarous and cruel,” it turned out that the fresh breeze and sunshine seemed to afford the overflow patients far better odds of survival than those inside the overcrowded, poorly ventilated hospitals.2039”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“In compliance with World Health Organization guidelines, Europe has forbidden the feeding of all slaughterhouse and animal waste to livestock.1267 The American Feed Industry Association called such a ban “a radical proposition.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Said USDA microbiologist Nelson Cox, “Raw meats are not idiot-proof. They can be mishandled and when they are, it’s like handling a hand grenade. If you pull the pin, somebody’s going to get hurt.” While some may question the wisdom of selling hand grenades in the supermarket, Cox disagrees: “I think the consumer has the most responsibility but refuses to accept it.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Who needs terrorists or Mother Nature, when through our own stupidity, we do things like this?”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, domesticated chickens and got typhoid fever,894 and domesticated ducks and got influenza.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“When it comes to the next pandemic, the question is never if, but when—and how bad?”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“The rabies virus, for example, is programmed to infect parts of the animal brain that induce uncontrollable rage, while at the same time replicating in the salivary glands to spread itself best through the provoked frenzy of biting.304 Toxoplasma, though not a virus, uses a similar mechanism to spread. The parasite infects the intestines of cats, is excreted in the feces, and is then picked up by an intermediate host—like a rat or mouse—who is eaten by another cat to complete the cycle. To facilitate its spread, toxoplasma worms its way into the rodent’s brain and actually alters the rodent’s behavior, amazingly turning the animal’s natural anti-predator aversion to cats into an imprudent attraction.305”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Many governments see it [disease prevention] as an internal business,” said the WHO’s director-general. “There is a basic gut feeling that this is my problem, I will deal with it in my way. Now, in a globalized world, any disease is one airplane away. It is not a provincial or national issue, it’s a global issue.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“If they would have acknowledged this [SARS] early, and we could have seen the virus as it occurred in south China, we probably could have isolated it before it got out of hand,” explained one infectious disease expert. “But they completely hid it. They hide everything. You can’t even find out how many people die from earthquakes.”2438 The foundation of the theoretical models is openness and cooperation for rapid detection of outbreaks of influenza. “Would they admit to it if it was here?” one Asian diplomat asked. “That’s the big question, since they deny everything left, right and center.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“The only way to truly stop a pandemic, it has been suggested, is to stamp it out at its source.2380 Once it starts, as noted the editorial board of the journal of the Canadian Medical Association, “School closure, quarantine, travel restrictions and so on are unlikely to be more effective than a garden hose in a forest fire.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Tyson Foods, the largest chicken-producing corporation in the world,2304 found itself before the Supreme Court in 2005 for refusing to pay workers for time spent donning protective clothing at a poultry plant. The Court ruled unanimously against Tyson.2305”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“The commercial poultry industry boasts of “biosecurity,” described as the industry’s “buzzword du jour,”2207 arguing that keeping birds confined indoors year-round protects them from exposure to wild birds and any diseases they might be carrying.2208 The U.S. National Pork Board defends large-scale pig confinement using the same rationale.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“One poultry specialist mused, “Mathematically, it is evident that the present rate of improvement in growth cannot be continued for more than a couple of decades, or the industry will be faced with a bird that virtually explodes upon hatching.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“The majority of the antibiotics produced in the world go not to human medicine but to prophylactic usage on the farm.1336 This may generate antibiotic resistance.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“In the United States, the average numbers of animals on chicken, pig, and cattle operations approximately doubled between 1978 and 1992.1112 This increasing population density seems to be playing a key role in triggering emerging epidemics.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“What are the odds that a killer flu virus will spread around the world like a tidal wave, killing millions? “The burning question is, will there be a human influenza pandemic,” Secretary Leavitt told reporters. “On behalf of the WHO, I can tell you that there will be. The only question is the virulence and rapidity of transmission from human to human.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“According to a survey in the Economist, the United States was ranked 55th in the world in terms of acute care beds per capita,706 comparable more to the developing world than to Europe, which has about twice the number of population-adjusted beds.707 Over the past generation, wrote the editor of Lancet, “the U.S. public health system has been slowly and quietly falling apart.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Unlike most other health-care systems in the world, health care in the United States is largely profit driven. The reconstruction of the U.S. medical system around managed care led to the closure of hundreds of hospitals across the country,697 leaving many cities with little surge capacity to deal with an abnormal influx of patients.698 HMO corporate stock profiles can ill afford to provide extra beds and ventilators for some indeterminate future surge of patients.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Influenza transmission is legendary. The dying cells in the respiratory tract trigger an inflammatory response, which triggers the cough reflex. The virus thus uses the body’s own defenses to infect other potential hosts.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“To facilitate its spread, toxoplasma worms its way into the rodent’s brain and actually alters the rodent’s behavior, amazingly turning the animal’s natural anti-predator aversion to cats into an imprudent attraction.305”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“Viruses are measured in millionths of a millimeter.301 As one writer described them, “Like tiny terrorists, viruses travel light, switch identity easily and pursue their goals with deadly determination.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic

“As if the pandemic weren’t tragic enough, in the decade that followed, a million people came down with a serious Parkinson’s-like disease termed “encephalitis lethargica,” the subject of the book and movie Awakenings.232 Some researchers now consider this epidemic of neurological disease to be “almost certainly” a direct consequence of viral damage to the brains of survivors.”
― Michael Greger, How to Survive a Pandemic