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“The issue of reimbursement by payers is an important factor that should be discussed. Is it possible that if radiologists use AI to read scans, they’ll receive less reimbursement? Or to approach this from the other angle, if payers are reimbursing for the use of AI, will they pay radiologists less as a result? My discussions with insurance executives have shown that they don’t think this is likely. If the use of these technologies will improve patient outcomes and lead to fewer errors, there are benefits to them that will motivate executives to pay for them in addition to radiologistsâ€� reading fees.”
― Ronald M. Razmi, AI Doctor: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - A Guide for Users, Buyers, Builders, and Investors

“With her knee in our neck, the goddess of the pandemics has paralyzed us and hindered many to breathe freely and consciously. Only if we discover the timelessness of the moment, we may happen to encounter the blue sky in our mind and fly high into the light of happy expectations. (“Resilienceâ€�)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Ignorance does not make you fireproof when the world is burning.”
― Nelou Keramati

“Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state: at times when people fear death, they go along with measures that they believe, rightly or wrongly, will save them—even if that means a loss of freedom.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“Search engine query data is not the product of a designed statistical experiment and finding a way to meaningfully analyse such data and extract useful knowledge is a new and challenging field that would benefit from collaboration. For the 2012â€�13 flu season, Google made significant changes to its algorithms and started to use a relatively new mathematical technique called Elasticnet, which provides a rigorous means of selecting and reducing the number of predictors required. In 2011, Google launched a similar program for tracking Dengue fever, but they are no longer publishing predictions and, in 2015, Google Flu Trends was withdrawn. They are, however, now sharing their data with academic researchers...

Google Flu Trends, one of the earlier attempts at using big data for epidemic prediction, provided useful insights to researchers who came after them...

The Delphi Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University won the CDC’s challenge to ‘Predict the Fluâ€� in both 2014â€�15 and 2015â€�16 for the most accurate forecasters. The group successfully used data from Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia for monitoring flu outbreaks.”
― Dawn E. Holmes, Big Data: A Very Short Introduction

“The masses don't have a clue about how bad climate change really is. It is driving the pandemics and increasingly severe weather events and things are going to get much worse than what we have already seen.”
― Steven Magee

“The Last Virus on Earth would likely be Us Humans.”
― Joey Lawsin, Biotronics: The Silver Species

“In more recent history, we learn from other viruses, including Measles, Ebola, Rabies, Herpes, how important it is to respond immediately to prevent the spread of infection. I was shocked when I learned more about the influenza pandemic, otherwise known as the Spanish Flu of 1918â€�1919. It began in the US, swiftly traveled across the world, and killed more people than any disease before or since.”
― Donna Maltz, Conscious Cures: Soulutions to 21st Century Pandemics

“For Marin, the city had an almost medieval look. The effect was belied by the swarms of hopjets, and Taxi-Airs, and other aircraft, large and small.
But his training had sharpened his ability to shut out extraneous material and to see essentials; and so, he saw a city pattern that had a formal, oldfashioned beauty. The squares were too rigid, but their widely varying sizes provided some of the randomness so necessary to achieve what was timeless in true art. The numerous parks, perpetually green and rich with orderly growth, gave an overall air of graceful elegance. The city of the Great Judge looked prosperous and long-enduring.
Ahead, the scene changed, darkened, became alien. The machine glided forward over a vast, low-built, rambling gray mass of suburb that steamed and smoked, and here and there hid itself in its own rancorous mists.
Pripp City!
Actually, the word was Pripps: Preliminary Restriction Indicated Pending Permanent Segregation. It was one of those alphabetical designations, and an emotional nightmare to have all other identification removed and to find yourself handed a card which advised officials that you were under the care of the Pripps organization. The crisis had been long ago now, more than a quarter of a century, but there was a line in fine print at the bottom of each card. A line that still made the identification a potent thing, a line that stated: Bearer of this card is subject to the death penalty if found outside restricted area.
In the beginning it had seemed necessary. There had been a disease, virulent and deadly, perhaps too readily and too directly attributed to radiation. The psychological effects of the desperate terror of thousands of people seemed not to have been considered as a cause. The disease swept over an apathetic world and produced merciless reaction: permanent segregation, death to transgressors, and what seemed final evidence of the rightness of what had been done: people who survived the disease . . . changed.”
― A.E. van Vogt, The Mind Cage

“We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia â€� breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals â€� and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies.

Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.”
― David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

“Pandemics are something that all of the population can join in.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“It belonged to that category of creature that, in a premonitory article written in 1903, Émile Roux had labelled étres de raison, or theoretical beings, organisms that can be deduced from their effects, though they have never been observed directly.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Zoonotics seem to be in the news for one reason or another of late.
From coronavirus (covid-19), bird flu (H5N1) and now monkeypox.
So called scientists say there is no connection.
Yet, the bird flu followed covid 19 hotspots.
Monkpox shows snd attacks some of the same human areas as covid-19 does.
Coincidence?
I don't think so.
It's time that we looked more closely at how these zoonotics may interact and why yet share a passion for the same areas of human sickness.
Sure. there may be no connection, but what if there is?
Yesterday and tomorrow have a connection to today. It's the same thing.
We need to look at the areas that these zoonotics attack. What they protein source (food) is. Where they have been predominately found and how would the map overlay plot their outbreaks.
The connection is there.
We just need to look.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“The worst extreme existential risk for humanity is not a nuclear war, the impact of a mega killer cosmic rock, nor a catastrophic disaster or a pandemic. The worst existential risk is humanity loosing its attraction towards risk. Without it, the stimulation to innovate would disappear, along with the progress of our civilization.”
― Jose Nessin Abbo, From Asteroids to Pandemics : Living a World of Spontaneous Risks

“I do not foresee the pandemics ending until the environmental radiation has been returned to its natural levels.”
― Steven Magee

“Computational models of infectious disease can make all the difference in our response to pandemics. As habitat loss and climate change make zoonotic spillover events increasingly more likely, COVID-19 is almost certainly not the last major pandemic of the 21st century.”
― Chris von Csefalvay, Computational Modeling of Infectious Disease

“Climate change is accelerating, there are no doubts about that. It is driving the pandemics and they are going to get worse. There has never been a more important time to have good human nutrition to stave off the worst effects of the pandemics.”
― Steven Magee

“The reality is the pandemics are getting worse and that will reduce the population. The smart people who figure out pandemic immunity will be the survivors.”
― Steven Magee

“There is weird stuff going on, far more than just COVID-19 and it is coming out of the changing environment.”
― Steven Magee

“Para um indivíduo em 2020, todavia, o vislumbre de uma pandemia como essa era fundamentalmente de ordem estética, experienciado com o distanciamento seguro oferecido pela arte â€� que não deixou de povoar o imaginário das últimas décadas com toda sorte de desastres biológicos e epidêmicos, não raramente fabricando cenários de epidemias vampirescas.
Certamente, nosso olhar para essas narrativas ganha complexidade no que atravessamos coletivamente o momento de crise. Uma questão, porém, inevitavelmente se assoma: do que nos fala essa â€� nada sutil â€� insistência?”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Tanto na arte como no real, a ²Ô±ð²µ²¹Ã§Ã£´Ç parece funcionar como desesperada, ainda que ineficaz, estratégia de tentar dissimular força e estabilidade, postergando até o último momento possível, inevitável, o enfrentamento real e direto da ameaça. Muitas vezes, porém, nesse ponto, as ações de contenção já não são eficazes ou suficientes.
Aos olhos dessas figuras, agências ou instituições governamentais que insistentemente negam ou relativizam as evidências empíricas e/ou científicas, sua admissão pública e transparente parece significar também uma aceitação de submissão à ameaça, um dobrar de joelhos metafórico que simultaneamente veicularia vulnerabilidade � não só à ameaça, como também aos olhos de todos os que de fora veem.
Agem como se a ²Ô±ð²µ²¹Ã§Ã£´Ç contínua da realidade fosse, em si, força suficiente capaz de deter o curso de eventos que independem totalmente de seu poder ou vontade.
Pergunto-vos: quando é?”
― Thiago Sardenberg

“Na era da (des)informação e da globalização, espalhando-se em progressão geométrica tal como o compartilhamento instantâneo das notícias falsas em um mundo intrinsecamente conectado, os próprios patógenos podem percorrer, em poucas horas, o globo; já não mais se deslocam lentamente, pegando carona com os passageiros de caravelas ou caravanas, meses a viajar por mares, rios ou estradas.
As pandemias do século 21 â€� reais e ficcionaisâ€� são intrinsecamente subjugadas ao lado perverso da era da internet e dos aviões a jato.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Tal como a pandemia da covid-19, em sua lúgubre asserção das fragilidades e incertezas que nos cercam, essas narrativas vampirescas com viés epidêmico-apocalíptico convidam reflexões acerca do papel da humanidade na construção desses cruéis cenários de desastre; inevitavelmente, rumamos a um futuro pelo qual teremos de nos responsabilizar.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Se pensarmos na Europa Oriental e na Ocidental como corpos-organismos distintos, o Deméter poderia ser então o vetor que carrega o patógeno-vampiro e o introduz no corpo deste novo hospedeiro suscetível, sem qualquer imunidade.
Nem mesmo o vetor, entretanto, resiste à ±¹¾±°ù³Ü±ôê²Ô³¦¾±²¹ do patógeno; ele próprio sucumbe à doença que inocularia, funcionando também como uma espécie de microcosmo do que poderia vir a acontecer caso o vampiro obtivesse sucesso em sua replicação: um cenário de desastre apocalíptico.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“A condição do vampirismo, pensada alegoricamente como doença infecciosa, seria de fato uma calamidade pública: tem alta infectividade, pois o contato direto com o vampiro é extremamente bem-sucedido em produzir novos vampiros, caso as vítimas venham a óbito; alta patogenicidade, pois sempre produz sintomas graves e sinais da doença, tais como os experienciados por Danny Glick; e alta ±¹¾±°ù³Ü±ôê²Ô³¦¾±²¹, sendo sua taxa de letalidade extremamente elevada.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“É possível verificar que conforme a doença-vampirismo se espalha pela narrativa, ela progressivamente a contamina com um discurso viral, que acaba permeando toda a ação: as pessoas se sentem “doentesâ€�, “um lixoâ€�, mas “deve ser só gripeâ€�; se Mike está doente, “alguns acham que ele pegou alguma doença do Danny Glickâ€�; quando a mãe de Danny Glick começa a ter sonhos estranhos com o filho morto, seu marido nota como “ela estava pálida [...] os lábios haviam perdido a cor natural, e ela ganhara olheiras escurasâ€�; se a Casa Marsten fede, o odor “lembrava lágrimas, vômito e trevasâ€�; se a indústria dos trailers cresce, ela cresce “como uma epidemiaâ€�; se o medo de uma doença indizível se espalha, “fantasias paranoicas podem ser contagiosasâ€�; se o vampiro logra atacar-me, “não encosta em mim, fui contaminadoâ€�.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Matheson instituía assim uma espécie de distopia vampiresca â€� sua obra servindo, inclusive, como modelo para muitos cenários de “apocalipse zumbiâ€� que surgiriam na segunda metade do século 20, como o clássico A Noite dos Mortos-vivos (1968) de George A. Romero â€�, fazendo uso desse modo narrativo que se apropria de tensões do presente para imaginar os mais variados cenários de desastre alternativos ou futuros, bem como da figura do vampiro como agente propagador de doenças, o veículo para o apocalipse.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Quammem afirma que vírus transmitidos pelo sangue precisam, em geral, de um vetor - frequentemente um inseto hematófago; aqui, uma capillaria â€� que deve “chegar em busca de uma refeiçãoâ€�: fica estabelecida uma intencionalidade.
Tal como o inseto, o próprio verme é atraído pelo sangue humano, ampliando assim as condições possíveis de transmissão da síndrome vampiresca. Os resultados desse quadro de alta transmissibilidade e infectividade são imediatos, logo começando a ser sentidos sob a superfície da cidade.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Narrativas como Apocalipse V e The Passage evidenciam o papel da humanidade na perturbação e desintegração de ecossistemas, fatores que acabam por favorecer a criação de cenários pandêmicos, no que somos expostos a novos patógenos que se encontravam placidamente contidos, e que podem ser responsáveis pela emergência (ou reemergência) de doenças infecciosas potencialmente perigosas.”
― Thiago Sardenberg, À Noite não Restariam Rosas: A Ameaça Epidêmica em Narrativas Vampirescas

“Storms are like epidemics and pandemics. They don’t last forever. But their impacts —like ridicules—do.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu