1The communication of disease from one person or organism to another by close contact.

这些房间没有接触传染的危险。

1. 1.1dated count noun A disease spread by close contact.
   〈旧〉接触传染病，触染病
   through personal hygiene the spread of common contagions is discouraged

   Example sentencesExamples

   • In perhaps the oddest twist of all, this most ferocious of contagions simply went away of its own accord, never (or, at least, not yet) to be seen again.
   • The contagion has spread to other countries and since there is no certainty about how the virus is transmitted, there is uncertainty about how to cope with it.
   • As a consequence, they would have come in contact with a vast array of other animals at the periphery of their habitat, which conceivably could have transferred a disease contagion to the great herds of the plains.
   • Or does the infection somehow permeate the entire environment, a contagion infecting everyone equally?
   • This contagion was spreading at an alarming rate, thanks also to the society's growing yet harmful indifference.
   • When dark imaginations seek images that speak to fear of contagion and plague, rats scurrying out of garbage piles and sewer holes supply a metaphor for humans.
   • To talk about an epidemic of obesity is like talking about a plague of inactivity or a contagion of overeating.
   • The text weaves between the two time frames, the past and the future, and in both people are dying of a mysterious contagion.
   • I heard that they spread their contagion through scratches made by their claws.
   • Deforestation and other radical ecosystem alterations also promote diseases, such as malaria and cholera, as well as new strains of existing contagions.
   • To cut down on crowds possibly spreading contagion, all the ice rinks, along with most other facilities, were temporarily closed.
   • The second, a wasting contagion, produces an entropic narrative of slow dying, finally petering away into ignominious extinction.
   • Mortality rates dropped with the control of such contagions as smallpox, but tuberculosis continued to be a major problem that retarded population growth.
   • The local daily never having printed the word, the contagion was spread almost exclusively among the hospital staff, in whom the disease lay latent for the month of July.
   • For scarlet fever patients were kept in hospital for six weeks and only allowed to speak to visitors through the window for fear of the contagion.
   • Meanwhile the trade ship requested the bodies of the colonists, and upon being told they had burned the settlement to prevent spread of the contagion, could do nothing further in the system so moved on.
   • Drains and sewers were known in ancient Rome, and when they were employed in the nineteenth century they were highly effective in reducing contagions.
   • There's only one problem: the contagions we are now resistant to are not Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
   • Indeed, the contagion is spreading across this country.
   • Not everyone in a city with a smallpox contagion is going to catch it, so the overall mortality for a population center would be less than that.

   Synonyms

   contamination, infection, disease, illness, infirmity, pestilence, plague, blight

   informal bug, virus
2. 1.2 The spreading of a harmful idea or practice.
   〈喻〉（有害观念或理论的）传播，散布，蔓延
   the contagion of disgrace

   不光彩事的散播。

   count noun a political fear, a contagion that spread from city to city

   Example sentencesExamples

   • However, stigma is much more than fear of contagion; it is also a tool used by cultures to exclude those felt to have broken extant rules.
   • Confidence in the underlying credit market has been undermined and contagion effects are spreading into adjacent markets.
   • The weeping spread like contagion to Amma and our maid.
   • Other authors under consideration in this book also developed fictions that explicitly deal with political fears of cultural contagion in an age of imperialism.
   • Violence, like any contagion, will spread to new and new categories of victims, endlessly reducing the remnant of the saved until it is purified out of existence.
   • Shareholders were holding their heads in horror last Thursday watching the London stock market execute a 225-point freefall as the US contagion spread into the UK.
   • As the contagion of revolutionary ideas spread to Italy, every government, princely or republican, strove to repress it.
   • By the 1690s, Spinoza's ideas could be found in all the bookshops, and even polemics against him served only to spread the intellectual contagion.
   • He continued: ‘The danger is disorder, and in today's world it now spreads like contagion.’
   • He would, he said, ‘abandon his best friends and join with his worst enemies,’ to prevent the contagion of French ideas spreading to Britain.
   • Fear of contagion from violence ‘up there’ became widespread.
   • The government was alarmed by two things above all - the impact of French notions of ‘self-determination’ on Britain's Low Country client states, and the contagion of ideas.
   • As investors flew to safety, the contagion of fear spread, first to the other emerging markets, then to the equity markets of more developed nations.
   • The revolutionary contagion spread and the diaspora provided, at least in the American republic, a climate in which plots against the union thrived.
   • Like a virus on the Internet, this contagion spreads globally, especially as bigger companies shrink their advertising budgets.
   • Then, in 1998, came the Russian default - and with it, fear that the contagion would spread, and economy after economy would fall ill and roll over dead.
   • But word about the product didn't spread by contagion alone.
   • I have fretted that some journalists might take it upon themselves to spread the vile contagion of conscience.
   • This became even clearer in 1998 as the financial contagion spread throughout the emerging world.
   • This outrage may in fact have the opposite effect, by spreading a martyr's contagion.