All 50 Uses of
epidemic
in
The Tipping Point
- It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and How of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics.†
Chpt Intr.
- The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall of New York's crime rate are textbook examples of epidemics in action.†
Chpt Intr.
- Of the three, the third trait — the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment — is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does.†
Chpt Intr.
- The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.†
Chpt Intr.
- A world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different place from the world we think we live in now.†
Chpt Intr.
- But if there can be epidemics of crime or epidemics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses.†
Chpt Intr.
- But if there can be epidemics of crime or epidemics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses.†
Chpt Intr.
- Contagiousness, in other words, is an unexpected property of all kinds of things, and we have to remember that, if we are to recognize and diagnose epidemic change.†
Chpt Intr.
- The second of the principles of epidemics — that little changes can somehow have big effects — is also a fairly radical notion.†
Chpt Intr.
- Epidemics are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun m fifty steps.†
Chpt Intr.
- To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality.†
Chpt Intr.
- (For an explanation of the mathematics of Tipping Points, see the Endnotes-) All epidemics have Tipping Points.†
Chpt Intr.
- In pursuit of this radical idea, I'm going to take you to Baltimore, to learn from the epidemic of syphilis in that city.†
Chpt Intr.
- I'm going to introduce three fascinating kinds of people I call Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen, who play a critical role in the word-of-mouth epidemics that dictate our tastes and trends and fashions.†
Chpt Intr.
- I'll take you to a high-tech company in Delaware to talk about the Tipping Points that govern group life and to the subways of New York City to understand how the crime epidemic was brought to an end there.†
Chpt Intr.
- Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don't?†
Chpt Intr.
- And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?†
Chpt Intr.
- ONE The Three Rules of Epidemics In the mid-1990s, the city of Baltimore was attacked by an epidemic of syphilis.†
Chpt 1
- ONE The Three Rules of Epidemics In the mid-1990s, the city of Baltimore was attacked by an epidemic of syphilis.†
Chpt 1
- Crack, the CDC said, was the little push that the syphilis problem needed to turn into a raging epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- What they were saying is that there was a subtle increase in the severity of the crack problem in the mid-1990s, and that change was enough to set off the syphilis epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium.†
Chpt 1
- The second, and perhaps more interesting, fact about these explanations is that all of them are describing a very different way of tipping an epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- There is more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words.†
Chpt 1
- Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.†
Chpt 1
- And when an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas.†
Chpt 1
- When we say that a handful of East Village kids started the Hush Puppies epidemic, or that the scattering of the residents of a few housing projects was sufficient to start Baltimore's syphilis epidemic, what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others.†
Chpt 1
- When we say that a handful of East Village kids started the Hush Puppies epidemic, or that the scattering of the residents of a few housing projects was sufficient to start Baltimore's syphilis epidemic, what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others.†
Chpt 1
- When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.†
Chpt 1
- Potterat, for example, once did an analysis of a gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, looking at everyone who came to a public health clinic for treatment of the disease over the space of six months.†
Chpt 1
- The ones causing the epidemic to grow — the ones who were infecting two and three and four and five others with their disease — were the remaining 168.†
Chpt 1
- In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs — a town of well in excess of 100,000 people — the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.†
Chpt 1
- These are the kinds of people who make epidemics of disease tip.†
Chpt 1
- Social epidemics work in exactly the same way.†
Chpt 1
- Epidemics tip because of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers.†
Chpt 1
- But they also sometimes tip when something happens to transform the epidemic agent itself.†
Chpt 1
- The strains of flu that circulate at the beginning of each winter's flu epidemic are quite different from the strains of flu that circulate at the end.†
Chpt 1
- The most famous flu epidemic of all — the pandemic of 1918 — was first spotted in the spring of that year and was, relatively speaking, quite tame.†
Chpt 1
- Just alter World War II, beginning in the Baltic port city of Danzig and spreading through central Europe, there was an epidemic of PCP that claimed the lives of thousands of small children.†
Chpt 1
- Goudsmit has analyzed one of the towns hit hardest by the PCP epidemic, the mining town of Heerlen in the Dutch province of Limburg.†
Chpt 1
- Goudsmit thinks that this was an early HIV epidemic, and that somehow the virus got into the hospital, and was spread from child to child by the then, apparently common, practice of using the same needles over and over again for blood transfusions or injections of antibiotics.†
Chpt 1
- The HIV epidemic tipped in the early 1980s, in short, not just because of the enormous changes in sexual behavior in the gay communities that made it possible for the virus to spread rapidly.†
Chpt 1
- This idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we regard social epidemics as well.†
Chpt 1
- But the hard part of communication is often figuring THE THREE RULES OF EPIDEMICS 1$ out how to make sure a message doesn't go in one ear and out the other.†
Chpt 1
- The seasonal effect on the number of cases is so strong that it is not hard to imagine that a long, hard winter in Baltimore could be enough to slow or lessen substantially — at least for the season — the growth of the syphilis epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- Epidemics, Zenilman's map demonstrates, are strongly influenced by their situation — by the circumstances and conditions and particulars of the environments in which they operate.†
Chpt 1
- The three rules of the Tipping Point — the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context — offer a way of making sense of epidemics.†
Chpt 1
- The balance of this book will take these ideas and apply them to other puzzling situations and epidemics from the world around us.†
Chpt 1
- Paul Revere's ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic.†
Chpt 2
- Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course.†
Chpt 2
Definition:
-
(epidemic) a widespread outbreak of a disease that is passed from one person (or other organism) to another
or more rarely: anything that spreads quickly -- especially something bad