Communicable disease– Any infectious disease that is transmissible is considered a communicable disease.

 

Epidemiology of epidemics– This is the study of health hand disease conditions in defined populations.

 

Council on Foreign Relations– This council is an independent nonpartisan member organization, think tank, and publisher. There are over 4700 members who include Erin Burnett, Angelina Jolie, and Chuck Hagel.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey– Elizabeth Sinskey is the director of the World Health Organization. Elizabeth is the Greek translation of the Hebrew name, Elisheva, which means God’s Promise. 

World Health Organization– A branch of the United nations most directly involved in Health related issues, specifically, communicable diseases and epidemic prevention.

 

Glucocorticoids– Glucocorticoids are steroid hormones that are used to treat diseases caused by an overactive immune system such as asthma and allergies. Elizabeth Sinskey was given this drug for her severe asthma. However, the drug damaged her reproductive system, causing her to become infertile.

 

Geometric progression– A geometric progression is a sequence of numbers found by multiplying each term after the first by a constant referred to as the common ratio. The mysterious man talking to Sinskey in this chapter claims that the population is growing even faster than a sequence with a common ratio of 2.

Melinda Gates–  is a Catholic who pledged $560 million to improve access to birth control. However, the Vatican is fighting the usage of condoms in Africa.

 

Machiavelli– Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was “an Italian historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance.” Sinskey and the mysterious man reference a quote by Machiavelli:

“When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere… the world will purge itself in one or another of these three ways (floods, plague and famine).”

Harold Pratt House is the headquarters to the CFR. Harold Pratt was an American oil industrialist who also served on the CFR. Like Dan Brown, he went to Amherst.

 

 

 

 

The graph used in the novel to illustrate the geometric progression of the human population is cropped. The graph actually shows that 12 billion people are the carrying capacity of the Earth.

However, Dan Brown removed part of the graph in order to imply that the population will continue to grow and grow without stopping.

 

Dan Brown claims that a global population of around 4 billion people is the optimal population. However, the optimal population is dependent on our continuously developing technology.