Free The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston Page B

the point: “I will try to inoculate the [buggers] with some blankets that may fall into their hands.” Not long afterward, one Captain Ecuyer, a British soldier, wrote in his journal: “Out of our regard for [two visiting chiefs] we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” It did, and smallpox subsequently burned through the human population of the Ohio River valley, killing considerable numbers of Native Americans. This was strategic biological warfare, and it worked well, at least from the English point of view.
    Vision
     
    IN THE LATE seventeen hundreds, the English country doctor Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaids who had contracted cowpox seemed to be protected from smallpox, and he decided to try an experiment. On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus “the Vaccine Virus”—the word
vaccine
is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy’s arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient—today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination—the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. “It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice,” Jenner wrote in 1801.
    IN 1965, Donald Ainslie Henderson was thirty-six years old and was the head of disease surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, when he wrote a proposal for the eradication of smallpox in west Africa. In common with most medical authorities at the time, he didn’t believe that smallpox or any other infectious disease could be eradicated from the planet, but he thought that perhaps it could be done in a region. Somehow, his proposal ended up at the White House and had an effect there. For years, the Soviets had been getting up at meetings of the World Health Assembly—the international body that approves the WHO’s programs—and demanding the global eradication of smallpox, and now Lyndon Johnson decided to endorse the idea. It was a political move to help improve Soviet-American relations. Henderson was abruptly called to Washington to meet with a top official in the U.S. Public Health Service, James Watts, who informed him that he was going to WHO headquarters in Geneva to put together such a program.
    “What if I don’t want to go?”
    “You’re ordered to go,” Watts said.
    “Suppose I refuse?”
    “Then you will resign from government service.”
    Henderson assumed that the attempt to eradicate smallpox would fail in about eighteen months. He told his wife, Nana, and their three children that they were going to stay in Geneva for a little while, until the program fell apart and they could come home. They put most of their things in storage in Atlanta and arrived in Geneva on the first of November. The Henderson family settled into a bungalow near Lake Geneva, not very far from the town where variola had been given its official name in A.D. 580, and they rented a refrigerator, since D.A. felt they weren’t going to be there long. They would not see their stored things for another twelve years.
    The Eradication program was built on the idea that variola has one great weakness: it is able to replicate only inside the human body. People have become its only natural host. Wherever it had come from in nature, it had actually lost the ability to infect its original host, and indeed, perhaps its original host had gone extinct. Variola