the demon in the freezer richard preston

[...]... communal living, while others, including Peter, favored the hippie ideals of the sixties In August 1969 -the month of the Woodstock music festival - eight members of the Bochum commune, including Peter, packed themselves into a Volkswagen bus and set off for Asia on an Orientreise There were six men and two women on the bus, and they were apparently hoping to find a guru in the monasteries of the Himalayas,... pustules appeared, although the reddening deepened in color When the doctors pressed their fingers on her skin, turned white under the pressure, but when they released their fingertips the blood came rushing back in a moment, filling under the skin The doctors recognized this sign, and it was very bad I don't know how much the doctors told Birke of what they understood was coming The red flush across her... idiot from Berlin! Turn the machine off!" The smoke man ignored them Meanwhile, Richter and Posch had gone outdoors and were standing on the lawn Wehrle heard them shouting, and he opened a window and looked out The smoke was seeping outdoors under the raised casement window and flowing in a thin, fanlike sheet up the walls of the hospital Wehrle ran around and began opening the upper windows just a... said Insects are tortured by poxviruses There are three groups of insect poxviruses: the beetlepoxes, the butterflypoxes (which include the mothpoxes), and the poxes of flies, including the mosquitopoxes Any attempt to get to the bottom of the insect poxes would be like trying to enumerate the nine billion names of God Insects don't have skin-they have exoskeletons-and so they can't pustulate Instead,... caused the plague of Athens in 430 B.C., which killed Pericles and dealt the city a devastating blow during the opening years of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta Variola may have caused the Antonine Plague in Rome, which seems to have been carried home by Roman legions who fought in Syria in A.D 164 Certainly smallpox rooted itself early in people living in the river valleys of China The Chinese worshiped... certain what happens in the cytokine storm of smallpox The virus is giving off unknown proteins that jam the immune system and trigger the storm, like jamming radar, which allows the virus to multiply unhindered In 1875, Dr William Osier was the attending physician in the smallpox wards of the Montreal General Hospital He called the agent that caused the sweet smell of smallpox a "virus," which is the. .. brown skin The scabs peppered their bedsheets and clothing, and were found scattered on the ground where they had walked The scabs were the lifeboats of variola The virus particles were nested in a protective web of clotted blood -the scabs were survival capsules raining from the bodies of now recovering and immune people The virus could wait patiently for some time in a dry scab, in the hope of finding... doses of smallpox vaccine in freezers in a building in downtown Geneva they called the Gare Frigorifique -the Refrigeration Station Much of the vaccine in the freezers had been donated to the Smallpox Eradication Program by the Soviet Union The traditional vaccine for smallpox is a live virus called vaccinia, which is a poxvirus that is closely related to smallpox Live vaccinia infects people, but it... virus exists in only two repositories: in freezers in a building called Corpus 6 at Vector in Siberia, and in a freezer in a building called the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta But, as Peter Jahrling often says, "If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy The genie is out of the lamp." Peter Jahrling has a high-level... couldn't speak with her family The red spots began to enlarge, and there were more and more of them They began to join together, like raindrops falling on a dry sidealk, gradually darkening the pavement: she was starting to flood with hemorrhages beneath the skin Her back hurt, but the change in her skin was painless, and she prayed and tried to remain optimistic Her skin was growing darker and soft and a . air. When they had finished the autopsy, the pathologists gathered up their tools and placed some of them inside the body cavity. The scalpels, the gardening shears, scissors, knives, the ladle -the prosection tools. a cigarette and looked out the window. The train arrived at the Ruhr River, and it followed the course of the river into the fir-clad mountains of the Sauerland, winding upstream under skies the color of carbon. Prevention -the CDC -in Atlanta, and spoke with Dr. Sherif Zaki, the chief of infectious-diseases pathology. Sherif Zaki inhabits a tiny office on the second floor of Building 1 at the CDC. The hallway