Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs
michael t. osterholm
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Mother Nature is the greatest bioterrorist of them all, with no financial limitations or ethical compunctions.”
“Like Abraham Lincoln, I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
“In any pandemic, effective leadership is critical, and the first responsibility of the president or the head of any nation is to offer accurate and up-to-date information, provided by public health experts, not agenda-oriented political operatives.”
“In a 2015 TED Talk, Bill Gates asserted, “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes”
“if you don’t know what you’re talking about, then don’t talk, or at least say you don’t know.”
“To further complicate the matter, we are altering the dynamic with pathogens simply through our encounters with them. By venturing into the microbes’ homes deep in rain forests, for logging, planting, and hunting for bushmeat; by concentrating large numbers of people together; by breeding millions and millions of pigs and poultry and keeping them in close confines; by overusing and misusing antimicrobial drugs, we humans are forcing microbes to adapt to continual stresses and giving them opportunities nature never did.”
“The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted. —SIR ALEXANDER FLEMING, MD”
“The battle lines are well drawn: the microbes’ genetic simplicity and evolutionary swiftness against our intellect, creativity, and collective social and political will. We cannot overwhelm the pathogens, because they so vastly outnumber and outmaneuver us. Our survival depends on outsmarting them.”
“Generally, seasonal flu is a remnant of a strain of the flu virus that once caused a pandemic.”
“But to understand the true biologic sense of the power of microbes, we must never forget that we are the ones trying to anticipate and respond to their evolution, not the other way around.”
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Book Keywords:
ethics, nature, bioterrorism
