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

merge with the Bay of Bengal. Bhola Island was the place toward which Wavy Gravy and Larry Brilliant
had set out four years before in their painted buses, hoping to help someone.
Stan Foster grabbed a shortwave radio, threw a few things into a small knapsack, and left
immediately for Bhola Island, traveling alone. He went to a pier in Dhaka and boarded a decrepit
paddlewheel steamer called the Rocket, and took a passenger cabin on the deck. The Rocket was three
hundred feet long, and it burned coal. It was a sidewheeler that had been built in 1924, and now it was a
rusted hulk, jammed with humanity, chuffing and splashing down the Ganges toward the sea. Foster
leaned on the rail as the boat made its way slowly along muddy channels, passing low shores lit by distant
gleams of oil lamps. A waxing moon climbed across the stars, and he turned into his berth and slept.
The air developed a hint of salt, and the Rocket entered an estuary, and shortly after sunrise the boat
arrived at the port of Berisal, the end of the line, where Foster disembarked. He boarded a smallpox
speedboat-an outboard motorboat run by the Eradication program-and it took him down across a vast
brown bay, dotted with wooden sailing craft. He passed canoes and lateen rigs and catboats and square
riggers, with cotton sails patched with cloths of bright colors; and he came to Bhola Island. It is thirty
miles long, and it then contained a million people but nothing like a city. The speedboat stopped at a
pier, and Foster disembarked. He was greeted by a team of local eradicators.
The island was a sandy mudflat where rice grew in profusion. There were palm trees and banana
trees, and little houses of thatch, and lots of people everywhere. Foster and the local team got into a
Land Rover and headed down a rutted road. The road got too muddy for the vehicle, so they parked
and walked to Kuralia. They were always in the presence of people, working in the rice fields, crowding
the paths. "You can't be in private in that country," Stan Foster said to me.
Local health workers led Foster and his team to a house belonging to Mr. Waziuddin Banu, a
poor man who could neither read nor write. He owned no land but worked the land for others. Banu's
house had a thatched roof and walls made of woven fronds of palm.
It was dark inside Banu's house. "I go in the house," Foster said, "and I can't see any cases of
smallpox. Then I see this burlap sack in the corner, with a foot sticking out. It was a little kid covered
with classical pox-a moderate case, not severe." The victim was a little girl, three years old, named
Rahima Banu. She was frightened of Foster, and had popped herself into the sack when he came in the
door. Rahima had scabbed over, and most of her scabs had already fallen off. She had caught the virus
from her uncle, a ten-year-old boy named Hares. Rahima, Hares, and a few other people with smallpox
in the village had been diagnosed by an eight-year-old girl named Bilkisunnessa. She reported the cases
to a local health worker, and she eventually collected a reward of sixty-two dollars from the WHO-a
fortune for a girl on Bhola Island.
Stan Foster raised Dhaka on the radio and told his people that he had confirmed a case of
smallpox. That night, an eradicator named Daniel Tarantola put together a large team in Dhaka, with
twenty motorcycles and barrels of gasoline, and they set out for Bhola Island aboard the Rocket. The
team organized a ring vaccination on the island, and they traced contacts, and vaccinated everybody who
might have been exposed. In succeeding weeks, they searched all over the island for new cases, but they
didn't find any. Now variola major was really finished on earth. The hot type of smallpox had been
uprooted.
When Stan Foster was with Rahima Banu, he took a bifurcated needle and used it to gently lift
six scabs from her legs and feet. He tucked them into a plastic vial that had a red top. The removal of
the little girl's scabs would not have hurt much, because they were falling off anyway. Each of Rahima's
scabs was a brownish crust about the size of the worn nub of a pencil eraser.
When he returned to Dhaka, Foster gave the scabs to a virologist named Farida Huq, and she
confirmed they were smallpox, and then she put the vial of Rahima's scabs into a metal canister, along
with a sheet of paper identifying the specimen. The canister went into a cardboard mailing tube and was
sent to headquarters in Geneva. A secretary named Celia Sands handled all the smallpox
samples-largely scabs in tubes-that were sent in from the field. She opened the packages on a table in
the work area in the middle of the SEP cubicles, took out the red-topped plastic tubes full of scabs, and