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

doctor named Donald Ainslie Henderson. Everyone called Henderson "D.A.," including his wife and
children. D. A. Henderson was the head of the Smallpox Eradication Program. He was six feet two
inches tall, with a seamed, rugged, blocky face, thick, straight, brown hair brushed on a side part, wide
shoulders, bigknuckled hands, and a gravelly voice. Wehrle and Henderson discussed strategy, and
Henderson made some telephone calls. The young man in the hospital at Meschede could start an
outbreak across Europe. Henderson told Wehrle to go to Germany. Wehrle got a taxi to the airport,
and that afternoon he was on a flight to Dsseldorf. Meanwhile, Henderson made arrangements to have
one hundred thousand doses of smallpox vaccine shipped from Geneva to Germany immediately.
While Paul Wehrle was en route to Meschede, Dr. Richter and the German health authorities got
Peter Los out of the St. Walberga Hospital-fast. The police closed off the hospital, and a squad of
attendants dressed in plastic biohazard suits and with masks over their faces ran inside the building and
wrapped Los in a plastic biocontainment bag that had breathing holes in it. He lay in agony inside the
bag. The evac team rushed him out of the building on a gurney and loaded the bag into a biosafety
ambulance, and with siren wailing and lights flashing, it took him thirty miles along winding roads to the
Mary's Heart Hospital in the small town of Wimbern. This hospital had a newly built isolation unit that
was designed to handle extremely contagious patients. The Wimbern biocontainment unit was a
one-story building with a flat roof, sitting in the middle of the woods. They placed Los on a silky-smooth
plastic mat designed for burn victims, and he hovered on the edge of death. Construction crews began
putting up a chain-link fence around the building.
That same day, Dr. Richter and Dr. Posch organized vaccinations for everyone at St. Walberga,
patients and staff alike. They were given a special German vaccine that was scraped into their upper
arms with a metal device called a rotary lancet, and then the doctors and their colleagues conducted
interviews, trying to find out who had come into contact with Peter Los. Anyone who had seen Los's
face was assumed to have breathed smallpox particles. Twenty-two people were taken to the Wimbern
hospital and put into quarantine. Everyone who had been in the south wing of St. Walberga but had not
seen Los's face was placed under quarantine inside the hospital, and they were ordered to remain there
for eighteen days. Folding cots were brought`in and set up in the bathrooms, where the medical staff
slept. There wasn't enough room to hold everyone, so the authorities took over a nearby youth hostel
and several small hotels in the mountains and put people there, too. After a hospital worker escaped
from quarantine and went home to his family, the authorities boarded up the doors of St. Walberga and
nailed them shut, and stationed a police cordon around the hospital.
Paul Wehrle arrived in Meschede on the evening of January 16th, having traveled by train from
D├╝sseldorf. He was met at the station by Richter and Posch. (Richter did the driving, since Posch had
lost an arm in the Second World War.) They took Wehrle to a hotel, and they stayed up most of the
night, planning a quarantine and vaccination campaign. The Germans wanted to vaccinate people with
the special German vaccine, but Wehrle did not trust it. It was a killed vaccine that the German
government had been using for many years, but the WHO doctors believed it didn't give people much
immunity. "The German vaccine had one small problem. It didn't work," Wehrle claims. "It was as
close to worthless as a vaccine can be, only I couldn't say that to the Germans and live, because they
tended to be a bit protective of their vaccine." He liked and respected the German experts and didn't
want to offend them, but he gently urged them to give everyone at the hospital a second vaccination with
the WHO vaccine. It couldn't hurt to have two vaccinations and might help, he said, and they agreed.
He also persuaded them to use the WHO vaccine for the larger vaccination in Meschede.
The WHO maintained a stockpile of millions of doses of smallpox vaccine in freezers in a building
in downtown Geneva they called the Gare Frigorifique-the Refrigeration Station. Much of the vaccine in
the freezers had been donated to the Smallpox Eradication Program by the Soviet Union. The traditional
vaccine for smallpox is a live virus called vaccinia, which is a poxvirus that is closely related to smallpox.
Live vaccinia infects people, but it does not make most people very sick, though some have bad
reactions to it, and a tiny fraction of them can become extremely sick and can die.
A staff member from the Gare Frigorifique drove a couple of cardboard boxes full of glass