Viral mutation Quotes

A couple of times a day I sit quietly and visualize my body fighting the AIDS virus. It's the same as me sitting and seeing myself hit the perfect serve. I did that often when I was an athlete.

Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time.

The nature of a protective immune response to HIV is still unclear. Because in a very, very unique manner, unlike virtually any other microbe with which we're familiar, the HIV virus has evolved in a way that the immune system finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the virus.

The virus in the movie 'Contagion' is based on the bird flu which came out of nowhere back in 2008. Everyone thought it was going to change the way we live and it just faded away. Wait a minute, I'm talking about President Obama.

Seasonal flu is now a pandemic that lasts for years and years because you've got so many people that it's jumping back between northern and southern hemispheres and moving itself around the world. By the time it gets back to where it started, it's changed sufficiently so that people are no longer immune.

The swine flu is evolution, isn't it? In a way, it's an evolution of flu.

With the absence of a flu vaccination last year, I did not take a flu shot; but there is still some immunity that carries over from year to year; but about every 30 years, there is a major change in the genetics of the flu virus.

We don't know what we don't know about Ebola. We think we know it's a virus, but is it mutating? Can it be spread by airborne?

Every time somebody new gets the Ebola virus, it mutates.

There are so many different varieties of HIV out there.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.

The problem with Ebola is that it makes mistakes while it copies itself. The mistakes are actually good for Ebola because they help Ebola change, and as a result of this, as it jumps from one human body to the next, roughly half the time, it's got a mutation.

As many times as [HIV] changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks.

Most of the infections linked to human cancers are common in human populations; they are ubiquitous. They were present during the whole human evolution process.