Everything is viral now, says Patel, "from financial crises to health epidemics to ideas".
We have already seen impressive examples for the social utility of big data, from predicting flue epidemics to diagnosing cancer.
Many of them were from the great plague, which was the last of centuries of devastating epidemics to have ravaged the crowded city.
Gladwell extends the idea of the tipping point from natural to social phenomena, from epidemics to fads, insisting that we can discover the scientific principles that govern both.
Phelan is continuing to provide advice on how global law can be used in international epidemics to reduce the spread of the Zika virus.
Yellow fever is also carried by mosquitoes, and epidemiologists expect epidemics to occur in cities in South America, and also Asia and the South Pacific.
Although it's telling that we have to cite asteroids and epidemics to make recent events seem less apocalyptic, there's no shortage of candidates for objectively worse years.
As more strains of TB become drug-resistant and as our world continues to globalize, we must learn from past epidemics to prevent this growing one.
"We've shown that by working collaboratively, across international borders and sectors, we can develop and test vaccines rapidly and use them to help bring epidemics to an end," he said.
The new defense doctrine seeks to prepare France and Europe for a post-Soviet world in which conventional military threats are downgraded compared with a multitude of complex, global risks, from epidemics to terrorism and cyberwarfare.
"Why are we sitting around passively waiting until new diseases infect half the globe?" Wolfe compares the current approach to infectious epidemics to the treatment of cardiovascular disease in the nineteen-sixties.
