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

entered the information about them into a log. She was getting smallpox boosters once a year. ("Now,
when you think about how we handled the specimens, it's so different from the way it's done today," she
said to me. "Nothing ever happened, though.") After she had logged and inspected them, she sent the
samples on to one of two smallpox repositories, either to the CDC or to the Institute for Viral
Preparations in Moscow.tThese two places were known as WHO Collaborating Centres. Sands
alternated sending samples to one or the other, so
that the Americans and the Russians would end up with roughly equal amounts of scabs.
The smallpox at the Moscow Institute was cared for by a fluffyhaired, somewhat stout pox
virologist named Svetlana Marennikova. She was highly regarded among pox experts, who found her
scientific ideas provocative and solid.
Rahima's six scabs ended up at the CDC, where around Christmas of 1975, a pox virologist
named Joseph Esposito transferred them with tweezers into a little plastic vial, smaller than a person's
pinky. With an extrafine Sanford Sharpie pen, he wrote RAHIMA on the vial, added some other
identifying data, and placed the vial in the CDC's reference freezer containing smallpox strains.
The strain of variola major that came from those scabs is known

The end of variola major, autumn 1974 to autumn 1975. These successive maps of Bangladesh
like frames of a movie that show the last blowup and final eradication of variola major from the
human species. You can see rings of containment around outbreaks, as well as "containment
failures"-smallpox bursting out. As the virus wanes under vaccination, it moves toward the east
and south, and finally it ends up on Bhola Island.
Courtesy of Stanley O. Foster, Center for Public Health Preparedness and Research,
Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, from The Eradication of Smallpox from
Bangladesh, by A. K. Joarder, D. Tarantola, and J. Tulloch (New Delhi: WHO South East Asia
Regional Office, 1980).




today as the Rahima. All six of her scabs are said to have been used up in scientific research, but the
Rahima exists, frozen in small plastic vials full of translucent white ice, which looks like frozen skim milk.
The milkiness is caused by vast numbers of particles of the Rahima strain, which have been grown in virus
cultures and are now suspended in the ice. The Rahima sleeps in a freezer and will never die, unless and
until the human race decides to end its relationship with variola, and puts the Rahima and all other
smallpox strains to death.
The weak strain of smallpox, variola minor or alastrim, continued to run in chains of transmission
around the Horn of Africa. The eradicators focused their attention there. On October 27th, 1977, a
hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin broke out with the world's final natural case of variola.
They vaccinated fifty-seven thousand people around him, and the final ring tightened, and the life cycle of
the virus stopped.


A Slit Throat

In the late summer of 1978, less than a year after Ali Maow Maalin contracted the last naturally
occurring case of smallpox, Janet Parker, a medical photographer in Birmingham, England, became sick.
Confined at home, she developed a blistering rash all over her body. Her doctor believed she was
having a bad reaction to a drug. Parker lived alone, and she became too ill to care for herself. Her
seventyseven-year-old father came to her house, helped Janet into his car, and drove her home to stay
with him and her mother. Parker grew sicker, and her parents took her to the hospital, where doctors