"The march of globalisation will create a single mega-population of people on the planet in which more and more viruses have the potential to survive and thrive. Distant will be the days when the isolation of remote villages imposed a natural quarantine on a nascent outbreak. From a virus's perspective, there will be a single mass of humans, tightly connected by air travel, with plenty of susceptible people to fuel the fire of new plagues, whether natural, accidental or deliberate."

-Nathan Wolfe, "Epidemic Intelligence", The Economist, 22 November 2010