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

Cruz. His plan was to investigate the Aztec empire, which was centered in great and powerful inland
cities.
One of the members of Captain Narv├вez's landing party was an African slave who was sick with
smallpox. Variola hatched from tiny spots in the man's mouth and amplified itself into a biological
shockwave that ran from the seacoast back into the Aztec empire, ultimately killing roughly half of the
human population of Mexico. The wave of death hat came out of less than a square inch of membrane in
the mouth of Captain Narv├вez's man went through Central America, and it boomed along the spine of the
Andes, where it gobsmacked the Inca empire. By the time the Spanish conquerors entered Peru,
smallpox had softened the place up, and had killed so many people that the armies of the Incas had
trouble putting up effective resistance. Smallpox had reduced the population of the Western Hemisphere
while showing itself to be the most powerful de facto biological weapon the world has yet seen. Measles
was also lethal in Native American populations, and it worked alongside variola in the Americas.) During
the French and Indian War, when Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribes was leading a siege against the
British at Fort Detroit in 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the head of the British forces, wrote a letter to one of
his field officers, Colonel Henry Bouquet: "Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these
disaffected tribes of Indians?" Amherst asked. "We must on this occaion use every stratagem in our
power to reduce them."
Colonel Bouquet got the idea of the stratagem quite well, and his reply was to the point: "I will try
to inoculate the [buggers] with some blankets that may fall into their hands." Not long afterward, one
Captain Ecuyer, a British soldier, wrote in his journal: "Out of our regard for [two visiting chiefs] we gave
them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."
It did, and smallpox subsequently burned through the human population of the Ohio River valley, killing
considerable numbers of Native Americans. This was strategic biological warfare, and it worked well, at
least from the English point of view.


Vision
 In the late seventeen hundreds, the English country doctor Edward Jenner noticed that
dairymaids who had contracted cowpox seemed to be protected from smallpox, and he decided to try
an experiment. On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps,
introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah
Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus "the Vaccine Virus"- the word vaccine is derived from the
Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months
later, Jenner scratched the boy's arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox
patient-today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner
had discovered and named vaccination-the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in
order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. "It now becomes too manifest
to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human
species, must be the final result of this practice," Jenner wrote in 1801.

In 1965, Donald Ainslie Henderson was thirty-six years old and was the head of disease
surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, when he wrote a proposal for the eradication
of smallpox in west Africa. In common with most medical authorities at the time, he didn't believe that
smallpox or any other infectious disease could be eradicated from the planet, but he thought that perhaps
it could be done in a region. Somehow, his proposal ended up at the White House and had an effect
there. For years, the Soviets had been getting up at meetings of the World Health Assembly-the
international body that approves the WHO's programs-and demanding the global eradication of
smallpox, and now Lyndon Johnson decided to endorse the idea. It was a political move to help
improve Soviet-American relations. Henderson was abruptly called to Washington to meet with a top
official in the U.S. Public Health Service, James Watts, who informed him that he was going to WHO