Tom Geisbert believed the anthrax spores were man made because he observed that something was clinging to the spores. When he turned up the beam the goop began to spread out of the spores. The spores had something in them like an additive.…
The book is primarily an account of the Smallpox Eradication Program (1967–80), the ongoing perception by the U.S. government that smallpox is still a potential bioterrorism agent, and the controversy over whether or not the remaining samples of smallpox virus in Atlanta and Moscow (the “demon” in the freezer) should be finally destroyed. However, the writer was overtaken by events — the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax letter incidents (called "Amerithrax"), both in 2001 — and so much of the book interweaves the anthrax investigation with the smallpox material in an awkward [1] and somewhat disjointed [2][3] manner.…
Polio an American story is a scholarly readable and informative book which covers the lives of many American eminent scientists who struggled a lot to eradicate polio. This book mainly focuses on the mid twentieth century where the people are very eager to find a vaccine to eradicate polio .This book also covers the entire topics from appearance of polio symptoms to post polio syndrome which shows the valuable thesis done by David M. Oshinsky.…
Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the world’s most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox--and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers--at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all vaccines.…
Being a frequent reader of Steven King's horror novels, I can honestly say that his creativity is truly demented, and for him to be horrified at Richard Preston's work in his book "Demon in the Freezer” is extraordinarily bizarre. The novel is extremely graphic, especially when Preston describes the symptoms of a type of viola, which, in my opinion, is the most daunting portion of the book. Preston describes a type of variola, hemorrhage small pox, in which bleeding occurs in the skin and is violently fatal that occurred to a student nurse whom Preston has chosen to call, Barbra Birke."...red spots merged & flooded together, until much of her skin became rubbery and silky smooth to the touch, with a velvety, corrugated look...the whites of her eyes developed red spots, and her faced swelled up as it darkened, and blood began to drip from her nose. It was smallpox blood, thick and dark...it darkens until it can looked charred, and can slip off the body in sheets...the rims of Barbara Birke's eyelids became wet with blood, while the whites of her eyes turned ruby red and swelled out in rings around the corneas...the corneas appear sunk in dark red pits, giving to the patient a frightful appearance...the blood in the eyes of a smallpox patient deteriorates over time, and if the patient lives long enough the whites of their eyes will turn solid black..."…
Jenner’s discovery of the link between cowpox and smallpox was significant to the development of a vaccine for smallpox. However, it can be argued that Jenner and his discovery were not enough on their own to bring medical progress. The factors Scientific thinking, Government Communication and Changing attitudes played a major and important role to bring medical progress.…
Smallpox is an extremely deadly disease which, in one point in time, was the most feared disease on the planet. In the book Pox Americana, Elizabeth A. Fenn writes about the encounter with the deadly disease in the 1770's to the 1780's. Her book was first published in 2001 in New York City, where she originally wrote it. Her book contains just under 400 words that explain the disease, some of the first encounters with it, who and where it affected people, and how they got the epidemic under control. Pox Americana is a very informative book that teaches the reader various things.…
On an ordinary Monday morning in 1995, millions of Tokyo residents on the way to work or school boarded trains on the second busiest subway system in the world. Only five people on the trains that morning knew that the events of March 20th would change the lives of nearly everyone commuting that day. Between 8:00 and 8:10 that morning, a simultaneous attack on five deferent cars, all set to converge on the Kasumigaseki station, a key location where several government ministries are located, killed 12 people, and injured another 5,000. The attacks were carried out by members of a religious doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo (Aum), and consisted of vials of the nerve agent sarin thinly wrapped in newspaper. The five men who carried the packages, eleven in all, placed them on the train’s floors and in overhead compartments, punctured the vials with specially sharpened umbrella tips, and exited at the next stop. The sarin liquid leaked and quickly vaporized, making anyone who was near subject to darkened vision, ocular pain, nausea, miosis, hyperaemia, and nosebleeds (Seto, 2001). On that spring day in Tokyo, Aum succeeded in becoming the first non-state sponsored terrorist group to carry out a large scale indiscriminate chemical attack on a civilian population. The events of March 20th were not unprecedented, however. Aum engaged in various forms of biological and chemical attacks for five years before they attacked the innocent citizens riding the subway in Tokyo, however the signs were ignored and the group was able to continue developing deadly weapons and experimenting with effective delivery methods with remarkably little government and law enforcement suspicion until shortly before the 1995 attack. The Japanese Intelligence and Law Enforcement agencies could have utilized a variety of Human Intelligence Collection Methods to identify the threat and prevent the worst attack on Japanese soil since World War II.…
Bioterrorism (Biological Warfare) is defined as the usage of infectious agents in killing or causing injuries to human’s, plants, and animals. It has been used all over the world by many different countries. Along with nuclear and chemical weapons, biological weapons are classified as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (2). It’s a mass destruction weapon because of it being highly contagious and having the ability to spread, creating a “blast radius” that is virtually endless. The reason why the impact of bioterrorism is so big nowadays is because powerful nations have the technology to create and also vaccinate different diseases while their weaker counter parts cannot (4).…
Bibliography: * Gordillo, Gordon. "The breath of the devils: memories and places of an experience of terror." American Ethnologist (2002): 33.…
The threat of bioterrorism is real. Although the threat of bioterrorism, itself, and the specific use of anthrax cannot be accurately quantified, the threat does exist and includes antibiotic-resistant strains of the organism rendering traditional antibiotic treatment, including all currently stockpiled antibiotics, ineffective.1,2 In this worse-case attack scenario, post-exposure vaccination is likely to fail with infection rapidly progressing to sepsis and death before the vaccine is able to confer immunity to the exposed first responders.3 The best mitigation strategy for the threat to first responders during a bioterrorism-related release of antibiotic-resistant anthrax is a voluntary, pre-exposure immunization program.4 Pre-attack vaccination of any person who self-assesses a high risk of exposure is the best strategy for preparedness to anthrax bioterrorism since the resultant immunity protects against anthrax disease inflicted by both antibiotic-sensitive and antibiotic-resistant…
Between April and December of 1721, over six thousand colonists in Boston contracted a world-wide feared viral infection known as smallpox. After the occurrence of over nine hundred deaths in Boston alone, the infestation of this disease in the colony became known as the Smallpox Epidemic. During the epidemic, it became widely acknowledged that survivors of smallpox were immune to later occurrences of the disease. This led to the consideration of the medical practice of inoculation—the deliberate introduction of the living smallpox virus to cause a mild case of the disease that would provide immunity. In contrast to the claims of its creators, inoculation was not always successful and did result in a small number of deaths in patients, but…
Since the last major breakout of smallpox, it killed millions of people. Nowadays, with the smallpox vaccine, the disease is practically wiped out. A vaccination of any sort of major disease will help end it.…
Once the child recovered from the cowpox disease, Jenner then tried to infect the child with smallpox, but the young man proved to be immune. “It seemed that this attempt at vaccination had worked. But Jenner had to work on for two more years before his discovery was considered sufficiently tested by the medical profession to permit widespread introduction” (Alexander, 2003). Beginning in 1831 and culminating in 1835, due to increasing vaccination, smallpox deaths were down to one in a thousand. In 1853, it was deemed obligatory for all children born after the first of August to receive routine immunizations. By 1898, one hundred years after Edward Jenner’s unveiling of the vaccine, smallpox in London had fallen dramatically – to one in every 100,000 (less than 50 people per…
Since September 11, 2001, The United States is being faced by the threat of having another terrorist attack. The use of biological weapons could the greatest treat because of the portability and the easy distribution of the agents (Neubert, 2010). The U.S. healthcare system is not fully capable of handling a biological terrorist attack because of funding needed to prepare for such disasters, resources to operate and overcome, and effective communication with the different agencies that would be involved.…