Richard Preston is quickly becoming one of my favorite non-fiction authors and I'll tell you why: he can scare the bejeezus out of me with very little effort. Take that, Stephen King!
I've read two of Preston's other works, The Cobra Event and The Hot Zone, both of which dealt with viruses that prey on the human species. The Cobra Event was a work of fiction, Hot Zone was non. Hot Zone, for interested parties, was a close look at the Ebola virus, specifically the Marburg strain, which traveled to the United States not too long ago. The book took an indepth look at how close we humans stand on the brink of annihilation from some of the simplest and most complex organisms on the planet- viruses. I won't ruin the books for potential readers, but I would highly suggest picking both of them up if you are, like me, into that doomsday-y kind of (non)fiction.
The Demon in the Freezer was written along the same lines. It is a work of non-fiction, compiled from interviews with the involved parties and through documents that the author worked through to get his facts. Demon was, I thought, not as well written as Cobra or Zone, but it is still definitely a book I would recommend reading.
One of the things I like about reading a Preston book is that he manages to explain all the medical and scientific jargon in a way that even simple lay-people like yours truly can understand. He's no Greg Bear or, to some extent, Michael Crichton (though Crichton did an admirable job). The information is factual, succinct, and easy to comprehend.
Demon was written shortly after the 9/11 attacks and takes a look at both bioterrorism and smallpox (variola). Preston recounts the anthrax scare of 2001, when letters were mailed to many government officials containing anthrax spores designed to circulate through large buildings and infect many people. People did in fact die of anthrax infection, which led to a panic similar to what is being experienced now by many people concerned with the swine flu (H1N1).
What was so incredibly frightening about Demon was the description of just how deadly smallpox could be if allowed to spread throughout a globalized world, where almost every part of the globe is readily accessible with little more than a day's travel. Unlike anthrax, smallpox can be passed from person to person and can be grown in garage labs at the expense of little more than what a new economy car would cost. It can also be modified to be resistant to medications, as Australian experiments with mousepox proved. The thought of a genetically modified virus that has a 95% fatality rate is truly terrifying.
Even more terrifying: tons of smallpox produced by the Soviet Union before it became Russia. This smallpox was loaded onto missiles pointed toward the United States. With the dissolution of the Union, the smallpox disappeared. It is unknown where much of it went, though speculation is rampant that it might have ended up in the hands of terrorists all over the world. The thought of smallpox in the hands of, say, al-Qaeda scares the shit out of me. If something naturally occurring, like the swine flu, has been so successful in traveling all over the United States, imagine something like variola major (the more dangerous strain of smallpox) being released in strategic locations throughout the nation. *shudder*
Variola in its natural form may have been eradicated throughout the globe, but it still exists in government (and perhaps terrorist) freezers the world over. If you think HIV or H1N1 is bad, try not to imagine someone setting off a smallpox bomb in New York or San Francisco, where it would quickly become a global problem. I would hate to see Stephen King become a prophet.
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