Larry Niven Quotes

More people in the world have died in such a short time of plague than has been heard or seen since the beginning of time …. Whoever touched the sick and dead was immediately infected and died …. That pestilence deprived of human inhabitants villages and cities so that there was scarcely found a man to dwell therein.

Of course when you look back from all the pandemics that have happened in the world, they were really scary.

Early in 1986, the World Health Organization in Geneva still regarded AIDS as an ailment of the promiscuous few.

Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague.

You'd see little shallow graves, lined up, one after the other - babies. That's what happens when measles goes through a nutritionally deficient community. It's a horrible disease, and it spreads incredibly efficiently.

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

You can't be involved in healthcare without being involved in the battle against AIDS.

It entered Egypt at the end of the season when the grasslands turn green, hence in the autumn of the year 748…This epidemic was distinctive in that it did not particularly affect one region and leave another untouched but spread to all parts of the Earth, in the East as in the West…Furthermore, it encompassed not just the human species but also the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the animals in the field…

I thought, wait and see—maybe it [AIDS] is not as hot as some are making it appear. I definitely admit to a gross underestimate. We're running scared.

Unfortunately, infectious diseases don’t pay much attention to budget cycles.

Influenza killed more people in September, October, and November of 1918 than AIDS killed in all the years since it entered the human population.

We can't predict when infectios diseases will break out, but their breakout is inevitable. That is why we must be prepared.

The AIDS is a disease that is hard to talk about.

The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster.

Historical records show that smallpox was a human scourge for thousands of years. The virus produces high fever, severe back pain and scarring eruptions of flat red spots on the skin that turn into pustules and then into scabs - a two-week process during which the disease is highly contagious.

AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

My father contracted polio on a troop train in Korea.

Without an adequate response, an epidemic can develop into a pandemic, which generally means it has spread to more than one continent.

Influenza pandemics must be taken seriously, precisely because of their capacity to spread rapidly to every country in the world.

There exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative.