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

stock market during the wild years of the Internet; he and Girija had three children; he became a
professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan; and, along with Wavy Gravy and Baba Ram
Dass, he established a medical foundation called the Seva Foundation. Today, the Seva Foundation has
cured two million people of blindness in India and Nepal. Along the way, Brilliant got to know Steven
Jobs through their common admiration for Neem Karoli Baba. Jobs had gone to India to become a
devotee of the guru, but by then Blanket Baba had gone incommunicado (he had died), so Jobs went off
to study at another ashram. "Steve Jobs was a pretty nondescript guy in India, walking around barefoot
with a shaved head," Brilliant recalled. "Then he started Apple Computer. I said to him, `Steve, why are
you wasting your time with this stuff? It isn't going to go anywhere.' " Jobs later donated the first seed
money to start the Seva Foundation.
"I've done a lot of things in life," Brilliant said, "but I've never encountered people as smart, as
hardworking, as kind, or as noble as the people who worked on smallpox. Everything about them - D.
A. Henderson, Nicole Grasset, Zdenek Jezek, Steve Jones, Bill Foege, Isao Arita, the other leaders -
everything about them as people was secondary to the work of eradicating smallpox. We hated
smallpox."
"D.A. once told me he thinks of smallpox as an entity," I said.
"An entity, yes. To me, smallpox was a she, because of the goddess. You would think of her as
having secret meetings with all her generals and staff, planning attacks."
Attacks came out of nowhere. Early on, Brilliant was sent to deal with an outbreak centered in a
train station in Bihar-the Tatanagar Station outbreak. He was twenty-eight years old, and Shitala Ma
taught him a lesson he would never forget, for the Tatanagar outbreak blew up into the largest outbreak
of smallpox in the world during the years of the Eradication, and it came as a total surprise. "I went to
the train station, and I found a hundred people dying of smallpox," Brilliant said. "I started crying.
Women were handing me their babies. The babies were already dead. I heard rumors of birds carrying
torn-off limbs of small children. Nothing in my life prepared me for that. I went to see the district
medical officer and found him standing on a ladder in his office, alphabetizing his books. The look on his
face was like a deer caught in headlights. `Don't you know what's going on?' I said to him. `What can I
do?' he said."
The virus was traveling inside people up and down the railroad line. As the people moved, so
did variola. The train station was exporting cases all over India and, in fact, all over the world. Brilliant
began to see what a worldwide transportation system could do to amplify the virus globally in a very
short time. He centered his effort first on the train station, where he found dozens of people with
smallpox climbing onto a departing train. He started yelling at the stationmaster to stop the train. He had
no authority, but the train stopped. He went to the police and told them to throw up roadblocks and
quarantine the city. He closed the bus station and stopped all the buses from running, and he closed the
airport. "I was just an American kid yelling," he says. Nicole Grasset stepped in with her authority and
political connections, and she put Brilliant in charge of the operation. It took six months of desperate
work, millions of dollars, and hundreds of staffers and health workers to put down the Tatanagar
outbreak of variola major. "That outbreak in the Tatanagar railway station gave rise to over a thousand
more outbreaks all over the world, even in Tokyo," Brilliant said. "It is not enough to think you've
cornered all but that last one case of smallpox, because that last one case can create those thousand
outbreaks."

Rahima

By 1974, smallpox was nearly gone from Asia. It had waned to a handful of cases in India and
Nepal, but it was not yet finished in Bangladesh. Smallpox is a seasonal virus-it breaks out and spreads
more easily when the weather is dry and cool, and it diminishes in moist, warm weather. People in
Bangladesh called smallpox boshonto, which means "spring." In south Asia, smallpox surged upward in
the early spring, which is the dry season, before the summer monsoons.tThe eradicators mounted