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

anthrax victims in the Soviet Union, in the spring of 1979, after a plume of finely ground anthrax dust had
come out of a bioweapons manufacturing facility in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) and had killed at least
sixty-six people downwind, but the photographs had not prepared him for the sight of the liquid that was
pouring out of this man's chest. They were going to have quite a time cleaning up the room. The bloody
liquid was saturated with anthrax cells, and the cells would quickly start turning into spores when they hit
the air.
Dr. Flannagan stood back. It was the turn of the CDC team. The CDC people wanted to look
at the lymph nodes in the center of the chest. Working gently with his fingertips, Zaki separated the lungs
and pulled them to either side, revealing the heart. The heart and lungs were drowned in red liquid. He
couldn't see anything. Someone brought a ladle, and they started spooning the liquid from the chest.
They poured it off into containers, and ultimately they had ladled out almost a gallon of it.
Zaki worked his way slowly down into the chest. Using a scalpel, he removed the heart and
parts of the lungs, which revealed the lymph nodes of the chest, just below the fork of the bronchial
tubes. The lymph nodes of a healthy person are pale nodules the size of peas. Stevens's lymph nodes
were the size of plums, and they looked exactly like plums-they were large, shiny, and dark purple,
verging on black. Zaki cut into a plum with his scalpel. It disintegrated at the touch of the blade,
revealing a bloody interior, saturated with hemorrhage. This showed that the spores that had killed
Stevens had gotten into his lungs through the air.
When they had finished the autopsy, the pathologists gathered up their tools and placed some of
them inside the body cavity. The scalpels, the gardening shears, scissors, knives, the ladle-the prosection
tools were now contaminated with anthrax. The team felt that the safest thing to do with them would be
to destroy them. They packed the body cavity with absorbent batting, stuffing it in around the tools, and
placed the body inside fresh double body bags. Then, using brushes and hand-pump sprayers filled with
chemicals, they spent hours decontaminating the supply room, the bags, the gurney, the floor-everything
that had come into contact with fluids from the autopsy. Robert Stevens was cremated. Sherif Zaki later
recalled that when he was ladling the red liquid from Stevens's chest, the word murder never entered his
mind.

The day before Robert Stevens died, a CDC investigation team led by Dr. Bradley Perkins had
arrived in Boca Raton and had begun tracing Stevens's movements over the previous few weeks. They
wanted to find the source of his exposure to anthrax. They believed that it would have to be a single
point in the environment, because anthrax does not spread from person to person. They split into three
search groups. One group flew off to North Carolina and visited Chimney Rock while the other two
went around Boca Raton. They all had terrorism on their minds, but Perkins wanted the team to make
sure they didn't miss a dead cow with anthrax that might be lying next to one of Stevens's fishing spots.
Working the telephones, they called emergency rooms and labs, asking for any reports of
unexplained respiratory illness or of organisms from a medical sample that might be anthrax. A
seventy-three-year-old man named Ernesto Blanco turned up. Blanco, who was in Cedars Medical
Center in Miami with a respiratory illness, happened to be the head of the mail room at the American
Media building, where Robert Stevens worked. Doctors had taken a nasal swab from him, and the
swab produced anthrax on a petri dish. Blanco and Stevens had not socialized with each other. The
only place where their paths crossed was inside the American Media building.
The zone of the suspected point source shrank abruptly, and the CDC team went to the
American Media building with swab kits. (A swab kit is a plastic test tube that holds a sterile medical
swab, which looks somewhat like a Q-tip and has a thin wooden handle. You swab an area of interest,
and then you push the swab into the test tube, snap off the wooden handle, cap the test tube, and label it.
Later, the swab is brushed over the surface of a petri dish, and micro-organisms captured by the swab
grow there, forming spots and colonies.) When they were running very short of swabs, Perkins and his
people made a decision to test the mail bin for the photo department of The Sun.
The swab from the mail bin proved to be rich with spores of anthrax. It was brushed over a petri