"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

Destruction, commonly known as the Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet diplomats helped
to write much of the language of the treaty, and the Soviet Union became one of three
so-called depository states for the treaty; the other two were the United States and Great
Britain. By making themselves depository states, the three nations offered themselves as an
example to be followed. It was believed that the resources of the intelligence community and
the vigilance and concern of the scientific community would serve to sound the alert to any
violations of the treaty.
But that belief turned out to be only a belief in the years following the treaty. For there
was no way to verify whether or not violations were taking place, and the truth is that much
progress was made in the development and engineering of bioweapons in various places
around the world. This was not noticed for a long time. It was an invisible history.




Part Three
Diagnosis



Monkey Room
The Centers For Disease Control,
Atlanta, Georgia
Wednesday Afternoon, April 22, 199-

The weather in Atlanta had turned glorious, blue, sunny, and hot. The late April air was
filled with a drifting scent of loblolly pines. Northeast of the city center, Clifton Road winds
through hilly wooded neighborhoods and goes past the headquarters of the Centers for
Disease Control, a warren of buildings made of brick and concrete. Some of the C.D.C.
buildings are new, but many are old and deteriorating and stained with age, offering visible
evidence of years of neglect by Congress and the White House.
Building 6 is a stained brick monolith, almost without windows, that sits in the middle of the
C.D.C. complex. It was once an animal-holding facility that stored populations of mice, rabbits,
and monkeys used for medical research. The C.D.C. grew and became so short of space that
eventually the animals were moved elsewhere, and the animal rooms were converted to
offices. They are the least desirable offices at the C.D.C., and therefore they are occupied by
the youngest people. Many of these people are in the C.D.C.'s Epidemic Intelligence Service --
the E.I.S., everyone calls it. About seventy officers enroll in the E.I.S. every year. During a
two-year fellowship, they investigate outbreaks of diseases all over the United States and,
indeed, the world. The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a training program for people who want
to go into public health as a career.
On the third floor of Building 6, inside a windowless former monkey room, Alice Austen,
M.D., a twenty-nine-year-old E.I.S. officer, was on phone duty. She was taking calls, listening
to people talk about their diseases.
'I got something bad,' a man was saying to her. He was calling from Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. 'And I know where I got it, too. From a pizza.'
'What makes you think that?' she said.
'It was a ham and onion. My girlfriend got the disease, too.'
'What do you think you have?' she asked.
'I don't want to, like, get too specific. Let's just say I got a V.D.'