The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston Page A

were nearly a thousand containment failures. It is said today that when the rings began failing in Bangladesh in the early spring of 1975, some of the leaders of the Eradication gave up hope. They felt that they had been wrong about variola after all, that ring containment wouldn’t work in the end, and that the evolutionary biologists might have been right in saying that no virus could be eradicated from nature.
    The program leaders in Geneva threw everything they had into the outbreak. Eradicators streamed in from the Soviet Union, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Great Britain, France, Sweden, and other countries. Although he had no legal authority to do so, D. A. Henderson threatened to close down the ports in Bangladesh and cut off all shipping if the government didn’t mobilize its resources and get its act together. The government of Sweden poured resources into the campaign, and OXFAM, a private charity based in Great Britain, sent large amounts of money and people. Those who arrived to help received a little bit of training and were thrown into the field. The eradicators mounted ring vaccinations across Bangladesh, and they traced cases and contacts, trying to surround the life-form, and then the summer monsoons arrived, bringing wet weather. An act of nature helped to cool the viral fire, and by the end of the monsoons of 1975 smallpox was again waning. On September 15th, in Chittagong, along the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal, a boy was found with smallpox. He was the world’s last case of variola major.
    They waited for two months to be sure, but there were no more reported cases. Finally, on November 14th, the program leaders in Geneva sent out a press release announcing that for the first time in human history the world was free of variola major.
    THE SMALLPOX ERADICATION PROGRAM team leader in charge of Bangladesh was an American doctor named Stanley O. Foster. The day after the announcement, Stan Foster received three telexes. One came from the WHO:
    CONGRATULATIONS FOR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT.
    Another came from the Centers for Disease Control:
    CONGRATULATIONS ALL DELIGHTED.
    There was also a third telex:
    ONE ACTIVE SMALLPOX CASE DETECTED VILLAGE KURALIA . . . BHOLA.
    Bhola Island sits in the lower delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, where their waters merge with the Bay of Bengal. Bhola Island was the place toward which Wavy Gravy and Larry Brilliant had set out four years before in their painted buses, hoping to help someone.
    Stan Foster grabbed a shortwave radio, threw a few things into a small knapsack, and left immediately for Bhola Island, traveling alone. He went to a pier in Dhaka and boarded a decrepit paddlewheel steamer called the
Rocket,
and took a passenger cabin on the deck. The
Rocket
was three hundred feet long, and it burned coal. It was a sidewheeler that had been built in 1924, and now it was a rusted hulk, jammed with humanity, chuffing and splashing down the Ganges toward the sea. Foster leaned on the rail as the boat made its way slowly along muddy channels, passing low shores lit by distant gleams of oil lamps. A waxing moon climbed across the stars, and he turned into his berth and slept. The air developed a hint of salt, and the
Rocket
entered an estuary, and shortly after sunrise the boat arrived at the port of Berisal, the end of the line, where Foster disembarked. He boarded a smallpox speedboat—an outboard motorboat run by the Eradication program—and it took him down across a vast brown bay, dotted with wooden sailing craft. He passed canoes and lateen rigs and catboats and square riggers, with cotton sails patched with cloths of bright colors; and he came to Bhola Island. It is thirty miles long, and it then contained a million people but nothing like a city. The speedboat stopped at a pier, and Foster disembarked. He was greeted by a team of local eradicators.
    The island was a sandy mudflat where rice grew in profusion. There were palm trees and banana trees, and