More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one
billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.
Anthrax does not spread as a contagious disease—you can’t catch anthrax from someone who has it, even if the victim coughs in your face—but smallpox could spread through North America like wildfire.
It has taken the world twenty years to reach roughly fifty million cases of AIDS. Variola could reach that point in ten or twenty weeks.
Henderson was a little bit like the Lion in the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis.
Jobs later donated the first seed money to start the Seva Foundation.
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.
Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species.
Ebola Zaire, kills up to ninety-five percent of its infected victims, and there is no cure for it.
Virus engineering had become standardized, and there were kits you could order in the mail for doing it.
It was getting easier to alter the genes of a virus all the time, and poxviruses were just about the easiest viruses to engineer in the laboratory.
Big Red Book—Smallpox
Most nonhuman primates do not like to sit down in the presence of humans and will get to their feet if a person is near them.
If a monkey is very sick, it will lie down when people turn their backs, but if anyone looks at the monkey, it will sit up again.
A key element in the design of a military bioweapon is the weapon’s intrinsic energy—the
the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) method, which can amplify tiny trace amounts of DNA. The method is so sensitive that if a person breathes on a sheet of paper, the paper can retain fragments of the person’s DNA that can be detected. There
Chen ordered the IL-4 gene through the Internet. It cost sixty-five dollars, and it came by regular mail at Mark Buller’s lab in November 2001, from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit institute in Manassas, Virginia,
You can order transfection kits in the mail from a variety of companies.
IN THE YEARS just before the Eradication began, two million people a year were dying of smallpox.
