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Heraclitus said that when a man dies, a world passes away.
USAMRIID’s mission is to develop defenses against biological weapons, both medicines and methods, and to help protect the population against a terrorist attack with a biological weapon.
Three years later, the United States signed the Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention, or BWC, which bans the development, possession, or use of biological weapons. The BWC has been signed by more than one hundred and forty nations, some of which are observing the treaty while others are not.
Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.
Smallpox virus can naturally infect only Homo sapiens.
“a peculiar state of apprehension and mental alertness that were said to be unlike the manifestations of any other disease,”
The exact cause of death in fatal smallpox is unknown to science.
Smallpox particles are the same size as smoke particles, and they behave exactly like smoke.
Even so, twenty percent of the people inside the south wing of the St. Walberga Hospital contracted smallpox. Eighty percent of them were on floors above Los’s floor, and with the exception of Father Kunibert, not one of them had provably seen Los’s face.
Viruses have many means of survival, and one of the most important is a virus’s ability to change natural hosts.
No fossils of viruses have ever been found in rocks, so the origin of viruses is shrouded in mystery.
virus needs a population of around two hundred thousand people living within fourteen days of travel from one another or the virus can’t keep its life cycle going,
seven thousand years ago.
sumptuous
bonhomie,
Biopreparat,
That is less than one dose of the vaccine for every twelve thousand people on earth.
The WHO has no plans to increase its stockpile now, since replacing the lost quantity would cost a half-billion dollars, and it doesn’t have the money.
Henderson founded the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and became its first director.
“It would make the possession of smallpox in a laboratory a crime against humanity. The likelihood that the virus would be used as a weapon is diminished by a global commitment to destroy it. How much it is diminished I don’t know. But it adds a level of safety.”
Hensley went on to get a Ph.D. in epidemiology and microbiology in three years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
She moved viruses from one type of host to another and watched trans-species jumps occur in the lab, before her eyes. She learned the standard methods of virus engineering—how to change the genes of a virus, altering the strain. Hensley had an
so that she could spend nearly every waking minute in the lab, with the goal of having three advanced degrees by her twenty-fifth birthday.
“Around twenty percent of the population can’t be vaccinated. They’re immune compromised, or they have eczema, or they’re pregnant women, or they’re very young children. That’s a large number of people who will have no protection if smallpox comes back. To me, it is not an acceptable loss.”
celerity
Nuclear weapons destroy everything. Biological weapons are more . . . beneficial. They don’t destroy buildings, they only destroy vital activity.”
Federation of American Scientists’ Biological Arms Control Program
Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go. All I knew was that the dream of total Eradication had failed. The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power. We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.
