Pathogen Spread Quotes

The Europeans liked to believe it was their valor, superior weapons and culture that won the New World. The real conquistadors were the armies of pathogens that raced on ahead to infect and kill 9 out of 10 of all the Indians of North, Central, and South America. The civilizations of the New World crumbled under the onslaught of invading microbes. Without this invisible army, Cortez and those who followed might never have stood a chance.

Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The "pox," as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity.

With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number.

Climate change affects the occurrence and spread of disease by impacting the population size and range of hosts and pathogens, the length of transmission season, and the timing and intensity of outbreaks.

There's always the danger when you have influenzas that infect chickens, that when you have the close quarters of chickens spreading from one to another and occasionally a human coming into close contact, that there will be the jumping of species from a chicken to a human. This is not something new.

Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.

In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.

One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife.