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There is most likely a fair amount of smallpox loose in the world. The fact is that nobody knows where all of it is or what, exactly, people intend to do with it.
Smallpox virus interacts with the victims’ immune systems in different ways, and so it triggers different forms of disease in the human body. There is a mild type of smallpox called a varioloid rash. There is classical ordinary smallpox, which comes in two basic forms: the discrete type and the confluent type. In discrete ordinary smallpox, the pustules stand out on the skin as separate blisters, and the patient has a better chance of survival. In confluent-type ordinary smallpox, which Los had, the blisters merge into sheets, and it is typically fatal. Finally, there is hemorrhagic smallpox,
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What a terrible day to read this.
Epidemiologists have done some mathematics on the spread of smallpox, and they’ve found that the 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, and it dies out. Those conditions did not occur until the appearance of settled agricultural areas and cities, about seven thousand years ago. Smallpox could be described as the first urban virus.
Henderson’s way of firing people was to suggest to them that there were jobs that were less demanding.
banana trees,
Camelpox virus is extremely closely related to smallpox. It makes camels sick, yet it hardly ever infects people—you could run your hands over the wet, crusted muzzle of a pustulated camel, then lick your hands and rub them on your face, and you would probably not catch camelpox.
The traditional vaccine, vaccinia, has a rate of bad reactions, including brain disease and death, that probably makes it unacceptable by modern standards of pharmaceutical safety. About one in five people couldn’t receive the vaccine under current rules. The vaccine is a live virus, and it can sicken or kill people who have lowered immune systems. Today, many people have lowered immunity, including those who are taking immunosuppressive drugs, such as people in chemotherapy or people with inflammatory diseases. Many people also have lowered immunity because they are HIV-positive. The vaccine
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If the smallpox vaccine was given indiscriminately to everyone in the United States, it is suspected that at least three hundred people would die, or perhaps one thousand or more—no one really knows—and many other people would be sickened. If a pharmaceutical company marketed a drug that killed a thousand people, it would be one of the biggest scandals in the history of the drug industry.
“If smallpox were to appear anywhere in the world today, the way airplane travel is now, about six weeks would be enough time to seed cases around the world,” he said. “Dropping an atomic bomb could cause casualties in a specific area, but dropping smallpox could engulf the world.” He sipped his Molson, and the sky turned the color of bluestone, and raindrops splattered across the wooden decks in the Japanese garden.
The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human—the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.
Harper had scabbed over, and his health had returned. They continued to feed him delicacies by hand, but they knew that he wouldn’t be permitted to live. The protocol of the experiment required the euthanasia of all animals, in order to gather more data on the effects of smallpox. And there was a biosafety rule that an animal infected with a Level 4 pathogen could not be taken out of Level 4 alive. Smallpox could leave the facility with the animal.
OF THE EIGHT MONKEYS that were given the Harper or India strains, seven died, six of hemorrhagic smallpox, one of classical pustular smallpox. Harper was the only survivor.
“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.”
He wanted to create an international abhorrence for any nation that would keep smallpox around. He wanted the demon cast out. “It still rankles me,” he said, “that we are giving smallpox to animals that could not get smallpox naturally, in order to protect humans, when the last time a human had smallpox was 1978, and humans shouldn’t naturally get it today. This is my circular indignation.”
A VIRUS that has been engineered in the laboratory is called a recombinant virus. This is because its genetic material—DNA or RNA—has genes in it that come from other forms of life.
Invitrogen. Chen grew monkey cells in a well plate, and
USAMRIID. United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Also known as the Institute or Rid.
