was exporting cases all over India and, in fact, all over the world. Brilliant began to see what a worldwide transportation system could do to amplify the virus globally in a very short time. He centered his effort first on the train station, where he found dozens of people with smallpox climbing onto a departing train. He started yelling at the stationmaster to stop the train. He had no authority, but the train stopped. He went to the police and told them to throw up roadblocks and quarantine the city. He closed the bus station and stopped all the buses from running, and he closed the airport. “I was just an American kid yelling,” he says. Nicole Grasset stepped in with her authority and political connections, and she put Brilliant in charge of the operation. It took six months of desperate work, millions of dollars, and hundreds of staffers and health workers to put down the Tatanagar outbreak of variola major. “That outbreak in the Tatanagar railway station gave rise to over a thousand more outbreaks all over the world, even in Tokyo,” Brilliant said. “It is not enough to think you’ve cornered all but that last one case of smallpox, because that last one case can create those thousand outbreaks.”
Rahima
BY 1974, smallpox was nearly gone from Asia. It had waned to a handful of cases in India and Nepal, but it was not yet finished in Bangladesh. Smallpox is a seasonal virus—it breaks out and spreads more easily when the weather is dry and cool, and it diminishes in moist, warm weather. People in Bangladesh called smallpox
boshonto,
which means “spring.” In south Asia, smallpox surged upward in the early spring, which is the dry season, before the summer monsoons. The eradicators mounted especially ruthless vaccination campaigns when the virus was at its ebb. In Bangladesh, they attacked the virus as hard as possible from September to November each year, when the virus seemed almost to rest—this was like killing a vampire in its sleep.
The autumn of 1974 saw a near total victory over variola in Bangladesh. In the first week of October, only twenty-four cases of smallpox were detected in the entire country. The WHO doctors could feel the end coming, and they predicted that Eradication would occur by December.
The summer monsoon of 1974 was fierce, causing the worst floods in fifty years to hit Bangladesh, especially in areas where there were still a few cases of smallpox. The floods set people in motion, and they settled in city slums called bustees. A few of them carried smallpox with them, and by December, variola major had begun to flicker unseen through the bustees of Dhaka, the capital.
In January 1975, the government of Bangladesh decided to clear out the bustees. Bulldozers flattened several in Dhaka, and the police ordered everyone to go back to their home villages. Around one hundred thousand people streamed out of Dhaka. Every person in Bangladesh lives within a two-week travel time of every other person in Bangladesh. The biological situation there is no different from what it was in Egypt or the river valleys of China thousands of years ago. Since the incubation period of smallpox is eleven to fourteen days, some of the people who came out of the bustees were incubating variola and didn’t know it, and they brought it back to their villages. In February 1975, with the coming of spring, variola major roared up in more than twelve hundred places across Bangladesh. It seemed to rise out of nowhere and everywhere, coalescing out of brushfires into a viral crown fire across the country.
The event was breathtaking in its suddenness, and it shook the eradicators to the core. The rings of containment began to fail across Bangladesh. The eradicators didn’t even know where to put rings, because variola seemed to be putting rings around them. They were seeing two hundred new outbreaks of smallpox every week. A failed ring vaccination was called a containment failure. During March 1975, there
Rahima
BY 1974, smallpox was nearly gone from Asia. It had waned to a handful of cases in India and Nepal, but it was not yet finished in Bangladesh. Smallpox is a seasonal virus—it breaks out and spreads more easily when the weather is dry and cool, and it diminishes in moist, warm weather. People in Bangladesh called smallpox
boshonto,
which means “spring.” In south Asia, smallpox surged upward in the early spring, which is the dry season, before the summer monsoons. The eradicators mounted especially ruthless vaccination campaigns when the virus was at its ebb. In Bangladesh, they attacked the virus as hard as possible from September to November each year, when the virus seemed almost to rest—this was like killing a vampire in its sleep.
The autumn of 1974 saw a near total victory over variola in Bangladesh. In the first week of October, only twenty-four cases of smallpox were detected in the entire country. The WHO doctors could feel the end coming, and they predicted that Eradication would occur by December.
The summer monsoon of 1974 was fierce, causing the worst floods in fifty years to hit Bangladesh, especially in areas where there were still a few cases of smallpox. The floods set people in motion, and they settled in city slums called bustees. A few of them carried smallpox with them, and by December, variola major had begun to flicker unseen through the bustees of Dhaka, the capital.
In January 1975, the government of Bangladesh decided to clear out the bustees. Bulldozers flattened several in Dhaka, and the police ordered everyone to go back to their home villages. Around one hundred thousand people streamed out of Dhaka. Every person in Bangladesh lives within a two-week travel time of every other person in Bangladesh. The biological situation there is no different from what it was in Egypt or the river valleys of China thousands of years ago. Since the incubation period of smallpox is eleven to fourteen days, some of the people who came out of the bustees were incubating variola and didn’t know it, and they brought it back to their villages. In February 1975, with the coming of spring, variola major roared up in more than twelve hundred places across Bangladesh. It seemed to rise out of nowhere and everywhere, coalescing out of brushfires into a viral crown fire across the country.
The event was breathtaking in its suddenness, and it shook the eradicators to the core. The rings of containment began to fail across Bangladesh. The eradicators didn’t even know where to put rings, because variola seemed to be putting rings around them. They were seeing two hundred new outbreaks of smallpox every week. A failed ring vaccination was called a containment failure. During March 1975, there
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