Word Finder - contagion

definition

A disease spread by contact

definition

The spread or transmission of such a disease

synonyms

• infection

definition

(by extension) the spread of anything harmful, as if it were such a disease

definition

A situation in which small shocks, which initially affect only a few financial institutions or a particular region of an economy, spread to the rest of financial sectors and other countries whose economies were previously healthy

definition

A resulting recession or crisis developed in such manner

It caught the contagion of poetry, philosophy and science.'

The contagion had spread through towns and villages and the open country, but it might still be stayed.

The earliest writers upon cholera emphasized its remarkable preference for particular places; and the history of each successive epidemic implies, besides an importation of the contagion, certain local conditions which may be either general sanitary defects or peculiarities of climate and soil.

The danger of contagion lies in the wonderful vitality of the spores, and their great resistance to heat and cold.

The only good of man is the pure existence of the soul, which in itself, apart from the contagion of the body, is perfectly free from error or defect; if only it can be restored to the untrammelled activity of its original being, nothing external, nothing bodily, can positively impair its perfect welfare.

Sharing combs, brushes, and hair accessories are other common methods of contagion.

The contagion spread very rapidly, extending as far as the Rhine provinces, and, across Germany, into Bohemia.

The questions naturally suggest themselves - Are the reappearances due to a revival of the contagion derived from previous outbreaks in the same place, or to some favouring condition which the place offers for the development of infection derived from some other quarter; and have favouring conditions any dependence upon the character and state of the soil?

An attempt was made to show that the contagion was brought home by Cossacks returning from the Turkish War, but on absolutely no evidence.

Burke and Grattan were anxious that provision should be made for the education of Irish Roman Catholic priests at home, to preserve them from the contagion of Jacobinism in France; Wolfe Tone, "with an incomparably juster forecast," as Lecky observes, "advocated the same measure for exactly opposite reasons."

Milan and Piedmont were comparatively well governed; but repugnance to Austrian rule in the former case, and the contagion of French Jacobinical opinions in the latter, brought those populations into increasing hostility to the rulers.

It may be noted in consecration how nicely the taboo or contagion, whether of holiness or unholiness, can be localized.

All grow from small beginnings and increase by a sort of popular contagion; all teach that God is to be appeased by prayers, presents, vows, but especially, and most irrationally, by human suffering.

He visited all the neighbouring parishes where the contagion raged, distributing money, providing accommodation for the sick, and punishing those, especially the clergy, who were remiss in discharging their duties.

Some of the epidemics of this period in Italy and Germany are known by the accounts of eminent physicians, as Vochs, Fracastor, Mercurialis, Borgarucci, Ingrassia, Massaria, Amici, &c., (3) whose writings are important because the question of contagion first began to be raised, and also plague had to be distinguished from typhus fever, which began in this century to appear in Europe.

The total number of deaths from plague in that year, according to the bills of mortality, was 68,596, in a population estimated at 460,000, 3 out of whom two-thirds are supposed to have fled to escape the contagion.

In 1720 Marseilles became affected with an epidemic plague, the origin of which was attributed by some to contagion through the ship of a Captain Chataud which arrived on the 10th of May 1720, from Syria, where plague at that time prevailed, though not epidemically when he sailed.

Hence, according to believers in contagion, the disease passed to families in the " old town," the poorest and unhealthiest quarter.

Opinions were divided, and the evidence appears even now nearly balanced, though the believers in contagion and importation gained the victory in public opinion.

The epidemic spread generally over Provence, but not to other parts of France, notwithstanding that, as confessed by D'Antrechaus, consul of Toulon, a believer in the exclusive power of contagion, there were abundant opportunities.

An outbreak of plague at Messina in 1743 is important, not only for its fatality, but as one of the strongest cases in favour of the theory of imported contagion.

Jevons (in An Introduction to the History of Religion, vii.) distinguishes between " things taboo," which have the mystic contagion inherent in them, and " things tabooed," to which the taboo-infection has been transmitted.

Ambrose, perceiving that this crowding together merely enabled the contagion to spread, had the image secretly removed.

It is imperative that hydration is maintained in affected animals and that precautions are taken to prevent contagion of adjacent stock.

The barons are now spreading the contagion to the developing world.

Nor could the heroism and the folly be kept apart, for there were few who could quite escape the contagion of the times.

And international response to financial crises is an imperative to limit the contagion of panic and financial losses.

The high degree of economic interdependence in the region spread the financial contagion from one country to another.

It is not offered as a general theory of cultural evolution, nor a general theory of social contagion.

However, little research has been done on relatives of individuals with emotional disorders, despite developments in the area of emotional contagion.

Instead, I let others suffer the full moral contagion, and make sure the only dirt on my hands is the physical sort.

And that would not be so bad, only for the deadly contagion.

Though it has at times denied this spirit, been guilty of crimes, persecutions, wars and greed - still the Church has never quite forgotten him who went about doing good, nor freed itself from the contagion of his example.

We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.

Emotional contagion is the psychological term used to describe the effect of how we can effectively catch the moods of others.

Children in daycare centers need to be reminded about hand washing during an outbreak to minimize contagion.

A distinction must be drawn between the above and diseases, like syphilis and small-pox, in which the contagion of, not the tendency to, the disease is transmitted directly to the foetus in utero.

In this connexion it is interesting to note the behaviour of the diphtheritic contagion in soil.

Thus malaria and sand-fly fever, dysentery, typhoid and paratyphoid fever, cholera, smallpox, and occasionally typhus fever, eye diseases, oriental sores and indeed any disease conveyed by impure water, flies, contaminated dust or the contagion of sufferers from infectious diseases, are prevalent in the inhabited places along the Persian Gulf, and precautions must always be taken to guard against them.

He narrates how the few that had themselves escaped the pest transmitted the contagion to all they met.

Early in November with colder weather it began to decline; and in December there was so little fear of contagion that those who had left the city " crowded back as thick as they fled."

In all 87,659 persons are said to have died out of a population of nearly 250,000.2 This great epidemic caused a panic in England which led to the introduction (under Mead's advice) of quarantine regulations, never previously enforced, and also led to the publication of many pamphlets, &c., beside Mead's well-known Discourse on Pestilential Contagion (London, 1720).

According to one view it was imported from the opposite coast of Dalmatia, though no definite history of contagion was established; according to others, it originated endemically in that place.

At Sydney a careful investigation was made; and the conclusion reached by Dr Tidswell was that " there was no ground for even a suspicion that our epidemic was being maintained by any process of direct contagion between man and man," but that rats were the carriers.

It is the note of every great religious reformer, Moses, Buddha, Paul, Mani, Mahomet, St Francis, Luther, to enlighten and direct it to higher aims, substituting a true personal holiness for a ritual purity or taboo, which at the best was viewed as a kind of physical condition and contagion, inherent as well in things and animals as in man.

To avoid contagion, it is legitimate for the EU to submit national budgets to a binding discipline.

Pasteur established (I) that the corpuscles are the special characteristic of the disease, and that these invariably manifest themselves, if not in earlier stages, then in the mature moths; (2) that the corpuscles are parasites, and not only the sign but the cause of the disease; and (3) that the disease manifests itself by heredity, by contagion with diseased worms, and by the eating of leaves on which corpuscles are spread.

To the philosophers (with the single exception of Plato), however, convinced as they were that the multitude must necessarily miss true well-being through their folly and ignorance, it could never occur to guard against these evils by any other method than that of providing philosophic instruction for the few; whereas the Christian clergy, whose function it was to offer truth and eternal life to all mankind, naturally regarded theological misbelief as insidious preventible contagion.

It is only the lowest form of virtue - the " civic " virtue of Plato's Republic - that is employed in regulating those animal impulses whose presence in the soul is due to its mixture with the body; higher or philosophic wisdom, temperance, courage and justice are essentially purifications from this contagion; until finally the highest mode of goodness is reached, in which the soul has no community with the body, and is entirely turned towards reason.