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

knows what the multiplier of smallpox would be today, and there is only one way to find out. If it has a
multiplier of something between five and twenty, it will likely spread explosively, because five or fifteen or
twenty multiplied by itself every two weeks or so can get the world to millions of smallpox cases in a few
months, absent effective control. It has taken the world twenty years to reach roughly fifty million cases
of AIDS. Variola could reach that point in ten or twenty weeks. The outbreak grows not in a straight
line but in an exponential rise, expanding at a faster and faster rate. It begins as a flicker of something in
the straw in a barn full of hay, easy to put out with a glass of water if it's noticed right then. But it quickly
gives way to branching chains of explosive transmission of a lethal virus in a virgin population of
nonimmune hosts. It is a biological chain reaction.
Peter Los gave variola to seventeen people. Thus the initial multiplier of the disease was
seventeen. Then the multiplier dropped dramatically under the effect of vaccinations and quarantine, and
went quickly to zero. The chain reaction stopped. The human population was like a nuclear reactor, and
the vaccine was a set of emergency control rods that were in place and ready to go, and were slammed
into the reactor as fast as possible by doctors who knew exactly what they were doing.
"The main lesson of Meschede," Paul Wehrle said to me, "is that you have to be sure of the
vaccine you are using."

During the scabbing phase, the survivors of the Meschede outbreak shed many small dark discs
of dried brown skin. The scabs peppered their bedsheets and clothing, and were found scattered on the
ground where they had walked. The scabs were the lifeboats of variola. The virus particles were nested
in a protective web of clotted blood-the scabs were survival capsules raining from the bodies of now
recovering and immune people. The virus could wait patiently for some time in a dry scab, in the hope of
finding another nonimmune host, if hope is a word that can be applied to a virus. Variola encountered
walls of resistant humanity extending all around it, and the ring of containment held at the headwaters and
mountains of the Ruhr - variola disappeared from that place on the earth, and has not been seen there
since.
Part Three - To Bhola Island

Somewhere between ten thousand and three thousand years ago, smallpox jumped from an
unknown animal into a person and began to spread. It was an emerging virus that made a trans-species
jump into people from a host in nature. Viruses have many means of survival, and one of the most
important is a virus's ability to change natural hosts. Species become extinct; viruses move on.
There is something impressive about the trans-species jump of a virus. The event seems random
yet full of purpose, like an unfurling of wings or a flash of stripes as a predator makes a rush. A virus
exists in countless strains, or quasi-species, that are changing all the time yet are stable as a whole;
together, they make a species. The quasi-species of a virus are like the surface of a flowing rapids,
buffeted and shaped by the forces of natural selection. The form of the virus is stable, even while the
edges and surface of the river are ever in motion and shifting a little, and the river of the virus always
seeks new outlets. If a particular strain of a virus that lives in an animal manages to invade a person, it
may be able to replicate there, and it may get to someone else. If it keeps moving, the result is an
unbroken chain of human-to-human transmission. The virus has opened a new channel to immortality.
This is what HIV did about fifty years ago in central or west Africa, when two different types of HIV
seem to have jumped out of sooty mangabey monkeys and chimpanzees, and began spreading in people.
Very often, when a virus jumps species, it is particularly lethal in its new host.
There are many poxviruses in nature, and they infect species that gather in swarms and herds,
circulating among them like pickpockets at a fair. There are two principal kinds of poxviruses: the poxes
of vertebrates and the poxes of insects. Pox hunters have so far discovered mousepox, monkeypox,
skunkpox, pigpox, goatpox, camelpox, cowpox, pseudo-cowpox, buffalopox, gerbilpox, several
deerpoxes, chamoispox, a couple of sealpoxes, turkeypox, canarypox, pigeonpox, starlingpox,
peacockpox, sparrowpox, juncopox, mynahpox, quailpox, parrotpox, and toadpox. There's mongolian