DOI: 10.1097/01.COT.0000295206.88678.8b
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Issn Print: 0276-2234
Publication Date: 2003/05/25
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Excerpt
By Richard Preston New York City, Random House, Hardcover, 238 pages, $24.95.
Reprinted from The New York Times
Ever since the publication in 1994 of The Hot Zone, a factual account of a barely averted disaster with accidentally imported Ebola virus, Richard Preston has been increasingly lionized as our troubadour of troubling microbes. In his latest book, The Demon in the Freezer, the spotlight shifts to another kind of microbial disaster, one that would be intentional and potentially much more lethal—a bioterrorist attack with the smallpox virus.
No human being is known to have been infected by smallpox for close to a quarter of a century. Yet in a world sensitized to the dangers of terrorism, talk of smallpox is on every front page and at every dinner table. Because infection is often lethal, because the virus is easily transmitted between people, and because the discontinuation of routine vaccination three decades ago has made us highly vulnerable, it is not difficult to imagine an attack—it could be as simple as the undetected arrival in the country of recently infected, suicidal terrorists—that is truly terrifying.
Policy analysts, public health officials, reporters, and many citizens have been imagining such attacks and considering ways to blunt them with the tools of antiterrorism and with medical science—renewed vaccinations, new medicines, swifter diagnoses. But few of the resulting news reports and books, however informative, portray the immediacy of our predicament with the passion of this work by Preston.
In an afterword he calls the book the third in a “trilogy on Dark Biology.” Throughout his trilogy, Preston has used a highly effective technique that seems simple but is artful and informed. He combines extraordinarily vivid descriptions of the pathological effects of infectious agents—including gruesome but fascinating visits to the autopsies of afflicted people and animals—with homely accounts of the ordinary routines of people who experience the infections and those who investigate them.
With these methods, which blend terror, technology, and trivia, he has probably done more than any other writer to establish a nationwide imperative to think about infectious agents as global threats and potential weapons.
The Hot Zone, the first in the trilogy, is a factual account that reads like a novel. Despite its frightening aspects, the outbreak of Ebola virus in monkeys imported by a research facility in Reston, Va., was not devastating, because the virus strain, now known as Ebola Reston, was unable to infect other hosts efficiently. Thus the outbreak was confined largely to the monkey colony.
The second volume, The Cobra Event, is a fiction that reads like fact, an account of mysterious deaths from a fabricated infectious agent. Buttressed by detailed accounts of the real history, politics, technology, and bureaucracy of bioterrorism, it had widely reported effects on national policy. After reading it, President Bill Clinton convened experts and government leaders to discuss its implications, and then readjusted his federal budget proposal to augment defenses against biological weapons.
In this third installment, Preston returns to nonfiction to address what almost all analysts would argue is the most dangerous of the known biological agents.
He teaches his readers about the chemical properties of the smallpox virus; how a single infected person (like a returning traveler in Meschede, West Germany, in 1970—but read bioterrorist in the post-9/11 world) can set off an epidemic; and what this horrendous disease can be like (in “flat hemorrhagic smallpox,” the skin “darkens until it can look charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets”).
