Viruses Quotations

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like.

The unique nature about the influenza virus is its great potential for changes, for mutation.

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.

As every new breed of virus is conceived, created and released into the wild, another small change is made to the anti-virus software to combat the new threat.

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet.

The idea of the live-virus vaccine is to produce in a continuous way some viral antigens.

We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.

Dance music is like a virus, it has affected so many different genres

The risk from viruses is an unanswered question -- and it won't be answered until you have had organs transplanted into humans over many years.

Maybe I should mention it: I was not from the beginning mainly interested in papilloma virus; I was mainly interested in infectious agents in human cancer. So papilloma viruses came up as the most likely candidate from my viewpoint.

Since most of the transmission is sexual transmission, you have a regional or local response to the virus.

Tobacco, UV rays, viruses, heredity, and age are the main causes of cancer.

The launch of phase 1 Ebola vaccine studies is a first step in developing a vaccine that could be licensed and used in the field to protect not only the front line health care workers but also those living in areas where Ebola virus exists.

Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.

People called '28 Days' and '28 Weeks' zombie movies, and they're not! It's some sort of virus; they're not dead.

Changes... can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form.

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

The modern diet is grossly deficient in hundreds of important plant-derived immunity-building compounds which makes us highly vulnerable to viruses, infections and disease.

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

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.

For the average home-user, anti-virus software is a must.

I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

I can't say I'm particularly happy about all the spam and the viruses and the equivalent that we see on the Net, but I think technology can deal with many of the problems that we're now seeing, whether it's filtering or whatever, and laws may help a lot.

Online threats to consumers have expanded from widespread nuisance viruses to targeted attacks designed to steal personal, confidential information.

Pet owners need to watch for clinical signs of respiratory problems and see their veterinarians if they spot any of the usual signs of a virus, such as runny eyes and nose or cough. Common viruses other than the flu can cause these signs in dogs, cats and birds. Many can be managed successfully in adult pets with proper supportive care.

Network neutrality is a nearly indefinable concept. For instance, does network neutrality mean that network operators can't block spam? Should network operators be allowed to stop viruses from spreading? Should large users of peer-to-peer software be allowed unlimited bandwidth so service for other users is slower?

We're shaking loose viruses and dislodging them from their natural ecological limitations, places where they aren't very abundant and have competition, even within a single animal. We introduce them into a new, rich habitat called the human population, where they can flourish more abundantly and cause more trouble.

Lethal viruses tend to flare up and disappear. The fact that the outbreak is over does not mean we can pretend it's not a problem, or that it's not coming back. But by identifying the link between SARS and the human population, we can take steps to break that link.

Mac users have not been forced to deal with the storm of viruses and vulnerabilities that Windows users deal with on a daily basis, so they tend to feel that they are safer than their Windows counterparts.

Many think that the Macintosh operating system is impervious to viruses or these kind of security threats. It is not that they are impervious; they are targeted less.

Many users will now delete an e-mail attachment that seems suspicious rather than open it up, so it has become more difficult for viruses to spread quickly.

Many people thought the Mac was invulnerable. That's never been true, but the low number of viruses and attack attempts has made it feel true.

Humanity is just a virus with shoes.

Parasites are not only incredibly diverse; they are also incredibly successful. There are parasitic stretches of DNA in your own genes, some of which are called retrotransposons. Many of the parasitic stretches were originally viruses that entered our DNA. Most of them don't do us any harm. They just copy and insert themselves in other parts of our DNA, basically replicating themselves. Sometimes they hop into other species and replicate themselves in a new host. According to one estimate, roughly one-third to one-half of all human DNA is basically parasitic.

Viruses don't just make us sick. They can actually sometimes end up in our genomes.

The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.

We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.

It used to be thought that only a certain kind of virus could get into our genome and it's called a retrovirus and that's a virus that might be HIV for example.

About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.

We really depend on viruses for our complete survival.

One of the big challenges now is to figure out just how many viruses there really are in the human genome. So far the estimate is 8.3% of our genome is virus, but it actually could be a lot higher.

When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.

From some dilatory reading in the early 1960s, I knew enough about viruses and their association with tumors in animals to understand that they might provide a relatively simple entry into a problem as complex as cancer.

Hard as it will be, we must find ways of structuring that co-existence, or we will never be able to stop viruses migrating from animals to us -- and to our children,

He wasn't on our anti-virus radar until Thursday. That suggests to us he probably didn't write viruses until now.

Goner is one of the most incredibly fast-moving and potentially dangerous e-mail viruses we've seen, ... We've seen most cases occur in France, the UK and the United States, in that order.

When you put someone on therapy, you lower the level of virus such that it makes it very difficult for them to infect others.

There is a strong social bias against such findings because many people want to believe obesity is due to an individual's lack of control on some personal, mental level, but we now think viruses may be a factor.

Like we handle antibodies against foreign proteins and we only get viruses like measles and chicken pox once, you can form antibodies against hundreds of things on the cells, ... The future is going tobe the development of those targeted therapies so that we will evaluate cancer cells in a much different way. We will do enzyme profiles and protein profiles to come up with almost a blueprint of the cancer and pick and choose those things that are available.

Recently, some strains of bird flu viruses have infected people in Asia. There is concern these new strains could cause a pandemic, but they are not infecting people in the United States at this time. Rather than wait for that possibility to occur, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is testing avian influenza vaccines.

Pc-cillin protects against viruses as well as protects against spyware and adware. It also has spam filtering and gives you a firewall to protect you from people trying to get into your computer. Norton 2005 does the same thing.

Other than the staff time that has gone into this, there are no other expenses, which is fortunate. Certainly, viruses can do damage to hardware.

Our findings provide a rational explanation for why H 5 N 1 viruses rarely infect and spread from human to human, although they can replicate efficiently in the lungs.

It is possible that the two viruses could mingle in one cell and from that single cell out would emerge a hybrid virus, a virus that had the characteristic of human influenza moving easily from person to person as well as the avian influenza characteristic being unrecognizable to the human immune system.

I think it's honestly a mixed bag. When you install Windows on a Mac, it is going to be susceptible to the same viruses that plague any other Windows system.

Trojans are different from viruses because they can lurk in PCs without anyone noticing and can spy on the computer user's activities then send this information back anywhere in the world.

I worry more about the H5N1 viruses that I work with.

Viruses emerging for the Mac OS X platform is headline news for Apple fans, but they are currently posing far from the level of threat that Windows users face every day. No-one should panic, but this is an indication that hackers are showing an increased interest in targeting the platform.

Viruses have a way of defeating our plans and that's something everyone is going to have to be aware of.

Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

The 92 per cent similarity may mean nothing and does not prove the bat was the original host. Even if two viruses are more than 99 per cent similar to each other, we still cannot say that they have a host relationship.

Windows get more viruses than Macs and UNIX systems, yes, but Macs are not immune. That's just a fundamental design issue in the operating systems.

You can have the same guy voting 10 times if you don't have the infrastructure to determine that the guy on the other side is who he is claiming to be. It's a challenge just getting people to get their viruses updated. Getting them to get their PKI authentication in place is something else entirely.

That would be a boon. It has always been a problem to obtain quickly viruses from Southeast Asia. We sincerely hope viruses from Turkey would be available very quickly.

We forecast that bird flu mutation is possible in the countries where the number of different viruses is high. This group includes the United States.

We know the virus is changing. We're watching little mutations occur all the time -- that's what flu viruses do.

We do have standard protection on every desktop. But shoot, we're seeing viruses all the time that our software doesn't catch.

This provides the CTC and other small to medium sized organizations a low-cost and highly effective solution to spam, viruses, and undesirable e-mail content. By creating a multi-layered defense that proactively repels spam and viruses at their source, organizations can now get ahead of troublemakers who are always looking for new ways of penetrating IT systems through e-mail.

There is competition among the people who write viruses to create special mischief around New Year's Eve. We think it's a good idea for companies to shut down their e-mail systems for about a 24-hour period. But they also need to have contingency plans for a period afterward so they can fix their systems in the case of time bombs sent earlier.

People's computers are not getting more secure. They're getting more infected with viruses. They're getting more under the control of malware.

There are a tiny number of mobile-phone viruses compared to the threat on the Windows platform.

This network focuses on systematic collection of information about influenza, information about what viruses are causing it, how they are being spread, and how fast.

We recognize that there are not a tremendous number of Mac viruses right now, but the threat does exist and they have popped up from time to time. In addition, we provide protection so the Macintosh doesn't become a means of introducing viruses into the broader mixed environment that many of our clients operate.

We documented a clear difference between bird viruses and human viruses.

We documented a clear difference between bird viruses and human viruses. You need much more work to demonstrate this actually contributes to virulence in nature.

We were alarmed to find such a dramatic increase in drug resistance in circulating human influenza viruses in recent years.

We'll start seeing viruses attacking Windows with the ability to infect Linux and Mac machines. It's not a stretch to imaging a single virus going across all three platforms and even further.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases - threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

In fact, a large majority of those have died and of those expected to die of AIDS, as well as of those who are infected with the virus, are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Only one form of contagion travels faster than a virus. And that's fear.

There are many other viruses it could be. The Ontario Public Health lab is working very hard on identifying which one of those viruses it might be.

With 30,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations from the seasonal flu, those numbers are certainly higher than what we've seen of the swine flu. Protecting yourself from both viruses is very important.

We picked viruses known to cross the placenta and get into the baby.

We do have it on our watch list of viruses that may become an issue. As always, we recommend that customers get their antivirus software updated.

To the untrained eye Mytob and Zotob can appear quite different: one group of viruses travels via email, the other primarily by exploiting a Microsoft security hole.

You have to consider the underlying infrastructure, ... If worms and viruses bog down your network, it's a data security issue, of course, but that's also going to affect voice quality and reliability.

Worms and viruses are increasingly being written to steal confidential data from innocent people's computers, to hijack resources, or launch spam or denial-of-service attacks,

If there is delay in getting culling teams out, delay in any part of the chain, even weeks, that could have great implications for the virus to spread.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

The potential for this virus to have an impact on commercial poultry production is significant. Having said that, we have been dealing with (milder) avian influenza viruses for decades ... finding it, containing it, and eradicating it.

We know from the testing that's been done so far that this is not influenza, we know this is not SARS, we know this is not avian influenza. There are many other viruses it could be ... and the Ontario Public Health lab is working very hard on identifying which one of those viruses it might be.

We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

Environmental bacteria and viruses are so prolific they're on everything.

Diseases are caused by viruses and bacteria. If the body doesn't happen to have those viruses or bacteria, then the risk is less,

Diseases, viruses and germs will survive the (warmer) winter. The best thing about our winter climate in this country is when we get cold winters it kills a lot of those things.

At this moment there is no pandemic influenza in the United States or the world, but if history is our guide there's reason to be concerned, ... In the last century, our country and the world have been hit by three influenza pandemics, and viruses from birds contributed to all of them.