The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston Page B

little houses of thatch, and lots of people everywhere. Foster and the local team got into a Land Rover and headed down a rutted road. The road got too muddy for the vehicle, so they parked and walked to Kuralia. They were always in the presence of people, working in the rice fields, crowding the paths. “You can’t be in private in that country,” Stan Foster said to me.
    Local health workers led Foster and his team to a house belonging to Mr. Waziuddin Banu, a poor man who could neither read nor write. He owned no land but worked the land for others. Banu’s house had a thatched roof and walls made of woven fronds of palm.
    It was dark inside Banu’s house. “I go in the house,” Foster said, “and I can’t see any cases of smallpox. Then I see this burlap sack in the corner, with a foot sticking out. It was a little kid covered with classical pox—a moderate case, not severe.” The victim was a little girl, three years old, named Rahima Banu. She was frightened of Foster, and had popped herself into the sack when he came in the door. Rahima had scabbed over, and most of her scabs had already fallen off. She had caught the virus from her uncle, a ten-year-old boy named Hares. Rahima, Hares, and a few other people with smallpox in the village had been diagnosed by an eight-year-old girl named Bilkisunnessa. She reported the cases to a local health worker, and she eventually collected a reward of sixty-two dollars from the WHO—a fortune for a girl on Bhola Island.
    Stan Foster raised Dhaka on the radio and told his people that he had confirmed a case of smallpox. That night, an eradicator named Daniel Tarantola put together a large team in Dhaka, with twenty motorcycles and barrels of gasoline, and they set out for Bhola Island aboard the
Rocket.
The team organized a ring vaccination on the island, and they traced contacts, and vaccinated everybody who might have been exposed. In succeeding weeks, they searched all over the island for new cases, but they didn’t find any. Now variola major was really finished on earth. The hot type of smallpox had been uprooted.
    When Stan Foster was with Rahima Banu, he took a bifurcated needle and used it to gently lift six scabs from her legs and feet. He tucked them into a plastic vial that had a red top. The removal of the little girl’s scabs would not have hurt much, because they were falling off anyway. Each of Rahima’s scabs was a brownish crust about the size of the worn nub of a pencil eraser.
    When he returned to Dhaka, Foster gave the scabs to a virologist named Farida Huq, and she confirmed they were smallpox, and then she put the vial of Rahima’s scabs into a metal canister, along with a sheet of paper identifying the specimen. The canister went into a cardboard mailing tube and was sent to headquarters in Geneva. A secretary named Celia Sands handled all the smallpox samples—largely scabs in tubes—that were sent in from the field. She opened the packages on a table in the work area in the middle of the SEP cubicles, took out the red-topped plastic tubes full of scabs, and entered the information about them into a log. She was getting smallpox boosters once a year. (“Now, when you think about how we handled the specimens, it’s so different from the way it’s done today,” she said to me. “Nothing ever happened, though.”) After she had logged and inspected them, she sent the samples on to one of two smallpox repositories, either to the CDC or to the Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow. These two places were known as WHO Collaborating Centres. Sands alternated sending samples to one or the other, so that the Americans and the Russians would end up with roughly equal amounts of scabs.
    The smallpox at the Moscow Institute was cared for by a fluffy-haired, somewhat stout pox virologist named Svetlana Marennikova. She was highly regarded among pox experts, who found her scientific ideas provocative and solid.
    Rahima’s six scabs ended up at