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

especially ruthless vaccination campaigns when the virus was at its ebb. In Bangladesh, they attacked the
virus as hard as possible from September to November each year, when the virus seemed almost to
rest-this was like killing a vampire in its sleep.
The autumn of 1974 saw a near total victory over variola in Bangladesh. In the first week of
October, only twenty-four cases of smallpox were detected in the entire country. The WHO doctors
could feel the end coming, and they predicted that Eradication would occur by December.
The summer monsoon of 1974 was fierce, causing the worst floods in fifty years to hit
Bangladesh, especially in areas where there were still a few cases of smallpox. The floods set people in
motion, and they settled in city slums called bustees. A few of them carried smallpox with them, and by
December, variola major had begun to flicker unseen through the bustees of Dhaka, the capital.
In January 1975, the government of Bangladesh decided to clear out the bustees. Bulldozers
flattened several in Dhaka, and the police ordered everyone to go back to their home villages. Around
one hundred thousand people streamed out of Dhaka. Every person in Bangladesh lives within a
two-week travel time of every other person in Bangladesh. The biological situation there is no different
from what it was in Egypt or the river valleys of China thousands of years ago. Since the incubation
period of smallpox is eleven to fourteen days, some of the people who came out of the bustees were
incubating variola and didn't know it, and they brought it back to their villages. In February 1975, with
the coming of spring, variola major roared up in more than twelve hundred places across Bangladesh. It
seemed to rise out of nowhere and everywhere, coalescing out of brushfires into a viral crown fire across
the country.
The event was breathtaking in its suddenness, and it shook the eradicators to the core. The rings
of containment began to fail across Bangladesh. The eradicators didn't even know where to put rings,
because variola seemed to be putting rings around them. They were seeing two hundred new outbreaks
of smallpox every week. A failed ring vaccination was called a containment failure. During March 1975,
there were nearly a thousand containment failures. It is said today that when the rings began failing in
Bangladesh in the early spring of 1975, some of the leaders of the Eradication gave up hope. They felt
that they had been wrong about variola after all, that ring containment wouldn't work in the end, and that
the evolutionary biologists might have been right in saying that no virus could be eradicated from nature.
The program leaders in Geneva threw everything they had into the outbreak. Eradicators
streamed in from the Soviet Union, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Great Britain, France, Sweden, and
other countries. Although he had no legal authority to do so, D. A. Henderson threatened to close down
the ports in Bangladesh and cut off all shipping if the government didn't mobilize its resources and get its
act together. The government of Sweden poured resources into the campaign, and OXFAM, a private
charity based in Great Britain, sent large amounts of money and people. Those who arrived to help
received a little bit of training and were thrown into the field. The eradicators mounted ring vaccinations
across Bangladesh, and they traced cases and contacts, trying to surround the life-form, and then the
summer monsoons arrived, bringing wet weather. An act of nature helped to cool the viral fire, and by
the end of the monsoons of 1975 smallpox was again waning. On September 15th, in Chittagong, along
the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal, a boy was found with smallpox. He was the world's last case of
variola major.
They waited for two months to be sure, but there were no more reported cases. Finally, on
November 14th, the program leaders in Geneva sent out a press release announcing that for the first time
in human history the world was free of variola major.
The Smallpox Eradication Program team leader in charge of Bangladesh was an American
doctor named Stanley O. Foster. The day after the announcement, Stan Foster received three telexes.
One came from the WHO: CONGRATULATIONS FOR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT. Another
came from the Centers for Disease Control: CONGRATULATIONS ALL DELIGHTED.
There was also a third telex: ONE ACTIVE SMALLPOX CASE DETECTED VILLAGE
KURALIA ... BHOLA.
Bhola Island sits in the lower delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, where their waters