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

occur until the appearance of settled agricultural areas and cities, about seven thousand years ago.
Smallpox could be described as the first urban virus.
The virus's genes suggest that it was once a rodent virus. Smallpox might once have lived in a
rodent that multiplied in storage bins of grain. Perhaps, perhaps not. Smallpox might be a former pox of
mice, or it might be a ratpox that moved on. Maybe, maybe not. There is, however, a strong suspicion
that smallpox made its trans-species jump into humans in one of the early agricultural river
valleys-perhaps in the valley of the Nile, or along the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, or in the
Indus River valley, or possibly along the rivers in China. By 400 B.C., the population of China had
grown to twenty-five million people, which was probably the largest and densest collection of people at
that time, and they were crowded along the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Down by the river
somewhere, the pox found its human lover.
The mummy of the Pharaoh Ramses V, who died suddenly as a young man in 1157 B.C., lies
inside a glass case in the Cairo Museum. His body is speckled with yellow blisters on his face, forearms,
and scrotum. It looks like a centrifugal rash. Pox experts would very much like to look at the soles of
the pharaoh's feet and the palms of his hands, to see if there are any blisters on them, for that would be a
sharp diagnostic sign of smallpox. But the pharaoh's feet are wrapped in cloth, and his hands are crossed
over his chest, palms downward, and the authorities at the Cairo Museum will not allow anyone to move
them. Pox experts would also like to clip out a bit of the pharaoh's skin and test it for the DNA of
smallpox virus, but so far that has not been allowed either.
Another possibility for the point of contact between humans and variola is Southeast Asia around
1000 B.C. Crowded city-states were developing there. Or the original host of smallpox may have been
an African squirrel that lived in a crescent of green forests that are thought to have once existed along the
southern reaches of the Nile River. The climate dried out, the forests disappeared or were cut down by
people, the country turned into grasslands, and the squirrel became extinct. Variola moved on.
It is possible that variola caused the plague of Athens in 430 B.C., which killed Pericles and dealt
the city a devastating blow during the opening years of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Variola may
have caused the Antonine Plague in Rome, which seems to have been carried home by Roman legions
who fought in Syria in A.D. 164. Certainly smallpox rooted itself early in people living in the river valleys
of China. The Chinese worshiped a goddess of smallpox named T'ou Shen Niang-Niang, who could
cure the disease. There was another goddess, Pan-chen, to whom people prayed if a victim's skin began
to darken with black pox. In A.D. 340, the great Chinese medical doctor Ko Hung gave an exact
description of smallpox. He believed that the disease had first come to China "from the west," about
three hundred years before his lifetime.
Variola may have caused a decline in the human population of Italy during the later years of the
Roman empire, making the empire more vulnerable to collapse under barbarian attacks. (The population
of Italy in late Roman times may also have been gutted by malaria, or perhaps by a double whammy of
malaria plus smallpox.) Variola dwelled along the Ganges River in India for at least the past two thousand
years. The Hindu religion has a goddess of smallpox, named Shitala Ma, and there are temples in her
honor all over India. (Ma means the same in Hindi as it does in English -"mother.") It is hard to say
whether Shitala Ma is a good goddess or a bad one, but you certainly do not want to make her mad. In
ancient Japan, smallpox arrived once in a while from China and Korea, but the virus couldn't start a chain
of transmission there because the population was too thin. Eventually, around A.D. 1000, the population
in Japan reached four and a half million, and apparently two hundred thousand people began to live
within about two weeks' travel from one another; smallpox came to live with them, and they came to
think of smallpox as a demon. In A.D. 910, the Persian physician al-Razi (Rhazes) saw a lot of smallpox
when he was the medical director of the Baghdad hospital. Ancient sub-Saharan Africa had a relatively
scattered human population and remained largely free of smallpox, except for occasional outbreaks along
the coasts, triggered by the comings and goings of traders and slavers. The more concentrated the
human population, the more likely it was to be thinned regularly by variola.
In 1520, Captain P├вnfilo de Narv├вez landed on the east coast of what is now Mexico, near Vera