"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

and sinuses had pustulated, and the lining of the rectum may also have pustulated, as it will do in severe
cases. Yet his mind was clear. When he coughed or tried to move, it felt as if his skin were pulling off
his body, that it would split or rupture. The blisters were hard and dry, and they didn't leak. They were
like ball bearings embedded in the skin, with a soft, velvety feel on the surface. Each pustule had a
dimple in the center. They were pressurized with an opalescent pus.
The pustules began to touch one another, and finally they merged into confluent sheets that covered
his body, like a cobblestone street. The skin was torn away from its underlayers across much of his
body, and the pustules on his face combined into a bubbled mass filled with fluid, until the skin of his face
essentially detached from its underlayers and became a bag surrounding the tissues of his head. His
tongue, gums, and hard palate were studded with pustules, yet his mouth was dry, and he could barely
swallow. The virus had stripped the skin off his body, both inside and out, and the pain would have
seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.
When the Sisters of Mercy opened the door of his room, a sweet, sickly, cloying odor drifted
into the hallway. It was not like anything the medical staff at the hospital had ever encountered before. It
was not a smell of decay, for his skin was sealed. The pus within the skin was throwing off gases that
diffused out of his body. In those days, it was called the foetor of smallpox. Doctors today call it the
odor of a cytokine storm.
Cytokines are messenger molecules that drift in the bloodstream. Cells in the immune system use
them to signal to one another while the immune system mounts a response to an attack by an invader. In
a cytokine storm, the signaling goes haywire, and the immune system becomes unbalanced and cracks
up, like a network going down. The cytokine storm becomes chaotic, and it ends with a collapse of
blood pressure, a heart attack, or a breathing arrest, along with a stench coming through the skin, like
something nasty inside a paper bag. No one is certain what happens in the cytokine storm of smallpox.
The virus is giving off unknown proteins that jam the immune system and trigger the storm, like jamming
radar, which allows the virus to multiply unhindered.
In 1875, Dr. William Osier was the attending physician in the smallpox wards of the Montreal
General Hospital. He called the agent that caused the sweet smell of smallpox a "virus," which is the
Latin word for poison. In Osier's day, no one knew what a virus was, but Osier knew the smell of this
one. When there were few or no pustules on the skin, he would sniff at a patient's wrists and forehead,
and he could smell the foetor of the virus, and it helped him nail down the diagnosis.
Around midday on Thursday, January 15th, five days after Peter Los had been admitted to the
hospital, the doctors began to suspect that he had die Pocken-smallpox. Smallpox causes different
forms of disease in the human body. Peter had classical ordinary smallpox.
The scientific name for smallpox is variola, a medieval Latin word that means "blotchy pimples."
The name was given to the disease around A.D. 580 by Bishop Marius of Avenches, in the Vaud region
of Switzerland. The English doctor Gilbertus Anglicus described the basic forms of smallpox disease in
1240. The virus is an exclusively human parasite. Smallpox virus can naturally infect only Homo sapiens.
It comes in two natural subspecies, variola minor and variola major. Minor is a weak strain that was
first identified by doctors in Jamaica in 1863, and is also called alastrim. While it causes people to
pustulate, for some reason it rarely kills. Variola major kills around twenty to forty percent of infected
umans who are not immune to it, depending on the circumstances of the outbreak and how virulent, or
hot, the strain is. As a generality, doctors say that smallpox kills one out of three people.
Virus particles are also known as virions. Smallpox virions are very small. About one thousand
of them would span the thickness of a human hair. It may be that you can catch smallpox if you inhale
three to five infectious virions, or particles. No one knows the infectious dose of smallpox, but experts
believe it is quite small.
Dieter Enste and the other doctors had not considered the idea that Peter Los might have
smallpox because the young man had no rash for several days, and he had gotten a vaccination just
before he had left Germany. He had gotten a second vaccination when he was in Turkey, but his
vaccinations had not taken-he had not developed a scar on his arm, which meant that he had not become