The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story

by Richard Preston

Other authorsJames Naughton (Reader)
2002

Status

Checked out

Collection

Publication

Random House Audio (2002), Edition: Abridged

Description

Chronicles the reaction of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) to the September 11 attacks and the October 2001 anthrax attacks, focusing on USAMRIID's top virologist, Peter Jahrling, and his work to combat the possible development of a superpox virus by terrorists worldwide.

User reviews

LibraryThing member satyridae
This, the story of smallpox in modern times (with a little anthrax for spice), is tautly written, like a thriller. Which it sort of is, only scarier because it's true. Preston is a good writer, he picks out memorable things about people, and he gets a free pass from me forever after referring to a
Show More
doctor as "like the lion in Narnia" with backup examples. Well done, if scary as all get-out. 3.5
Show Less
LibraryThing member weird_O
Although this book is almost 20 years old, it is very pertinent, given the current pandemic. [The Demon in the Freezer] focuses primarily on efforts to eradicate, once and for all, smallpox from the globe. Like HIV, ebola, and covid-19, smallpox is a virus, immune to antibiotics. (The plague that
Show More
killed millions during the middle ages, by the way, is a bacteria and IS cured by antibiotics.) A salient menace of smallpox is how easily it spreads. No more than a half-dozen particles of the virus are required to infect a human.

A smallpox outbreak in Germany in 1970 is instructive. Peter Los, 19, had driven with friends from Europe through Turkey and the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Upon his return home, he was hospitalized with strange symptoms, put in isolation. Within several days, doctors suspected he had smallpox, and they were correct. Los was quickly isolated in a separate building miles from the hospital, and he did eventually recover. The event triggered a massive inoculation effort, not simply of hospital workers, but of everyone living within a specified radius of the facility.

But in the few days Los was in the hospital's isolation unit, 17 others—several hospital workers, patients, and one unlucky visitor—were infected. The visitor put his face to the door of the isolation ward where Los was sequestered. The door was open just a crack, and though he was vehemently warned away and did immediately retreat, he nonetheless contracted "a wicked case" (he did survive). The 16 other people infected all worked in the second and third floors of the main building while Los was housed on the first floor of a semi-detached wing. Later testing with a smoke generator demonstrated how quickly and thoroughly air flowed from the isolation wing and into every corner of the structure. Despite a ban on smoking, Los would open his room's window a crack and puff away. The smoke test revealed that air would flow out the first floor window, up the exterior wall of the main structure, and get pulled into any open window on the second and third floors. Several of the additional cases proved fatal.

In terms of the current pandemic, we all are extraordinarily lucky that covid-19 does not (or at least has not yet) spread so quickly and effectively. The problem with covid-19 is that there's no known cure for it, as there has been for smallpox since the 1700s.

The demon of the title is, of course, the smallpox virus. As author Richard Preston explains, the World Health Organization (WHO) organized a global drive to eradicate smallpox, and in 1979 the goal was achieved. Enter the freezer. Not just a freezer, but a liquid nitrogen charged freezer, and not just A freezer but one in scores of medical research centers throughout the world. WHO negotiated an agreement to eliminate all stocks of smallpox virus with two exceptions: one in a freezer at the U.S. Center for Disease Control, the second in a similar facility in the Soviet Union. These two holdings were to be maintained "just in case."

In the late 1980s, a Soviet defector to the U.K., a virologist, revealed to British intelligence that he was engaged in Soviet research into weaponizing smallpox through genetic engineering. The Soviets had tons, yes, tons of the stuff in their freezers. Not long thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed. Now who's got The Pox?

Preston, an alum of John McPhee's respected writing course at Princeton University, embraced what he learned from McPhee. He spent days observing researchers in restricted Level 4 labs where "space suits" are required. He interviewed and traveled with researchers, executives, and eradicators in the U.S., Europe, India, and Bangladesh.

Read it. It's important.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ebnelson
Not for the faint-hearted. During the descriptions of several of the diseases profiled in this book, mainly small pox, I had to stop reading. Small pox is more evil than I thought reality could ever be, and Preston makes that abundantly clear with vivid detail. It’s not a straight-forward modern
Show More
history of the disease, instead Preston intentionally (and overtly) withholds information at times to allow for well-timed big reveals. I’m sure that works for some readers, but as someone who was most interested in learning the current state of small pox, I found it annoying at his apparent inability to summarize details outside his tightly controlled narrative.
Show Less
LibraryThing member sowdman
A good read. The story of the (almost) eradication of smallpox. Side stories of eboli, anthrax (after 9/11) and other diseases. Ends with current and scary stuff that can be done with gene manipulation of smallpox. Predicts that bioterrorism is the new and very cheap nuclear weapon.
LibraryThing member momnie
On December 9, 1979, smallpox, the most deadly human virus, ceased to exist in nature. After eradication, it was confined to freezers located in just two places on earth: the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Maximum Containment Laboratory in Siberia. But these final samples were not
Show More
destroyed at that time, and now secret stockpiles of smallpox surely exist. For example, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the subsequent end of its biological weapons program, a sizeable amount of the former Soviet Union's smallpox stockpile remains unaccounted for, leading to fears that the virus has fallen into the hands of nations or terrorist groups willing to use it as a weapon. Scarier yet, some may even be trying to develop a strain that is resistant to vaccines. This disturbing reality is the focus of this fascinating, terrifying, and important book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member libri_amor
One of the most frightening books I have ever read but one that should be read be everyone. Our only real defense against smallpox, like nuclear weapons, is that the consequences of their use are so horrendous as to be beyond comprehension and thus useless. This is really little comfort considering
Show More
human history but it’s all we have. Thus, the more everyone understands the horrors of smallpox the more it will be removed as a weapon.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Misoman
This book COULD be boring but Richard Preston has a way of integrating a journalistic, storyteller and onlooker point of view that makes this book thrilling. He conveys a sense of authority that doesn't make this book cheesy and he doesn't overdo the "doomsday" aspect of the small pox virus. I
Show More
thought this book was excellent and met my expectations after reading the amazing "Red Zone" book by Preston.

Miso
Show Less
LibraryThing member kraaivrouw
Another book that will give you some serious nightmares. Really cool & interesting stuff on how smallpox was eradicated by a huge team of people all over the world. At some point it was thought that the only smallpox left in the world was at the CDC in Atlanta & at a Russian virology facility.

Then
Show More
came the 1980's & pretty good evidence that the Russians were conducting research on weaponizing smallpox. Meanwhile, US eradicated its supply of vaccine (to save money) - leaving us with about 1 vaccine for every 12,000 people. Then the Soviet Union fell apart & who knows where all those stores of weaponized smallpox went. Just yikes.

While the emerging hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola are pretty freakin' scary, they (so far) aren't airborne - transmission is from skin and mucous membrane contact. Ebola also tends to burn through a population very quickly - killing off so many people around it that it runs out of places to jump. This makes it a less than optimal bioterrorism weapon.

Smallpox, however, is unbelievably scary. It's airborne. During the 20th century it was responsible for between 300-500 million deaths. Transmission rates were it to re-emerge today are estimated to be at about an order of 10. That means 1 infected person would infect 10 others who would each infect 10 others, etc.

Preston covers the debate among current scientists around whether or not to continue working with smallpox & testing it. Those against argue that it should all be destroyed. Those for argue that it can't all be destroyed and that with the ever present threat of bioterrorism on the rise, research should continue if only for the purpose of developing better vaccines. There are a number of nasty complications associated with the current vaccine which has been around since 1796.

Preston also talks a bit about the anthrax letters, transmission, and early stages of the investigation into who sent them, but as the book was published in 2002, not much is known at the time he was writing.

This book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in this stuff. It's technical enough, but not so technical you want to pull your eyes out. Quite enjoyable, if scary.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kaida46
Another good one from Preston. These books can be more horrifying than any horror book because they are about reality. Science writing, but not dry or boring at all and understandable even if you don't have a science back round. It will make you wonder if that smallpox injection which left a scar
Show More
on your arm from grade school in the sixties, was actually worth it after all (probably not, its too old). The foolishness is that all this fear (and possible future horror) could have been prevented if only the sample of a disease which was supposed to be eradicated in the world wide population was actually destroyed and not mysteriously lost from the laboratory where it was stored.
Show Less
LibraryThing member breic2
Preston focuses on the 2001 anthrax attacks, together with the potential for smallpox to be used as a biological weapon.

The story is a bit disjointed, although it mostly follows chronological order. It is quite compelling, though. Preston gives us the science, but also close and insightful looks
Show More
at the involved personalities. A very fast read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member co_coyote
Richard Preston first got our attention with The Hot Zone, and I will say this about him: he is a terrific story teller. This true account of smallpox virus and anthrax bacteria may leave a couple of loose ends around (it was written in 2002, before the anthrax case came to its unsatisfying
Show More
conclusion, and you get the sense that he didn't really know what to do about the smallpox story), but that doesn't keep you from turning the pages late into the night. Partly because it's just darn hard to go to sleep, given all the new things you have to worry about! Well told, and scary.
Show Less
LibraryThing member thezim
Such an interesting book!
LibraryThing member lndgrr
Excellent book about smallpox.
LibraryThing member abbylibrarian
I now know way more than any person should probably know about small pox, so it's a good thing I find all that medical ookiness interesting. This book isn't for the faint of heart and, um, small pox would TOTALLY SUCK. Very interesting that humans kind of have had the chance to completely
Show More
irradicate small pox, but it's also kind of impossible to do that since it's been weaponized. Narration was fine - I was interested enough in the subject matter that the no-frills narration didn't make or break this book. Recommended for people who like fascinating books and aren't grossed out by pus.
Show Less
LibraryThing member enemyanniemae
Ack! We're all going to die from smallpox! No, wait... we're all going to die from anthrax! No, wait... we're all going to die from anthrax-laced smallpox! No, wait... MONKEYPOX is going to get us! Or is it mousepox? Meh. Whatever.

This is the second book I've read from Richard Preston. You'd have
Show More
thought that I'd have run screaming from his writing after reading The Hot Zone. But, no. I had to read more. Granted, it has been many years since the mere thought of recycled air on a plane gave me the heebie jeebies, but still... this is scary stuff.

You thought that smallpox had been eradicated and that the remaining seeds of the virus had been destroyed. You would be wrong. You thought that the smallpox vaccination that you got 50 years ago is still protecting you. (ok, it was I who got the vaccination 50 years ago... don't forget that I was premature) You would be batting 0 for 2.

Not only is smallpox still around, but our friendly neighborhood scientists have experimented with the damned virus for so long, it's possible that if there is an outbreak, the world might have to deal with a super-virus. Oh, joy. Richard Preston goes into fairly graphic detail when he writes about pox, what it does and how it does what it does.

Wait, there's more. The author veers from variola (our pox's true name) after the anthrax attacks in 2001. He revisits the anthrax laced letters that were mailed to two senators and several news agencies. He reminds us about the postal workers who died from anthrax, the elderly woman who died from anthrax because she inhaled a few spores that were clinging to a letter that was processed in the same facility as the anthrax letters. He reminds us that five people altogether died from that attack. He also reminds us that no one was ever caught... and that it would be very easy for another attack to be launched.

Scary and scarier.

So. The book is fairly disjointed. It starts out as a warning about smallpox and then suddenly takes off in the direction of anthrax. It jumps around fairly frequently. However, I found the whole thing fascinating. Preston uses a casual narrative style, which makes the book easy to read and easy to understand. I won't say that I enjoyed it, but I felt the same way about The Hot Zone. Fascinating and unsettling. Did you know that there is a pox for just about every living creature? Me either. But there is. And you'll learn about them all in this book.

One word of warning... I tried taking the book with me to a restaurant. Bad move. Weeping pustules and pasta primavera do not mix. Srsly. Eww.
Show Less
LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C
I remember Preston's previous book, The Hot Zone about Ebola, absolutely blowing me away. A non-fiction book that was more terrifying than any thriller by Michael Crichton. This didn't impress me the way that other book did, even if it did suck me in and engross me--it read incredibly fast, the
Show More
kind of book you can tear through in a few hours if you're even a moderately fast reader.

There certainly were parts of this book that were chilling and terrifying--and parts that were inspiring. The inspiring part told the story of the Small Pox Eradication program that in the course of less than fifteen years eliminated a virus that has been "thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen"--even more than the Black Plague. This book sweeps past the history of small pox faster and less thoroughly than I liked. The earliest use of a vaccination he mentioned was by an English physician in 1797. Yet I can remember reading how George Washington inoculated his troops for small pox during the Revolutionary War. I also remembered reading how John Adams was inoculated against small pox as a young man. So obviously there's more to the history of this disease and the fight against it than is presented in the book, although Preston does allude to how it (and possibly measles) had a horrific impact on the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, virtually annihilating them, and how blankets infected with small pox were used by the English, at least in one documented case, against the Indians in a primitive form of biological warfare. But my own knowledge of small pox left me feeling the historical picture given the reader was incomplete.

The main focus of the book though is the prospect of modern biological warfare. For when the World Health Organization ended the work of small pox eradication there were two official, legal sources left undestroyed--one in America and one in Russia. That is the demon in the freezer. And Preston details the evidence that the Soviets used their stock to create strategic weapons to be delivered on biologically tipped warheads--and that the knowledge, and stocks of the virus, have certainly made their way to other nations. So the demon's loose. If that's not scary enough, Preston also devotes much of the book to the 2001 Anthrax attacks. This book was published in 2002, so there wasn't much resolution to that story. And I have to admit I was... well, disconcerted by the emphasis laid on the Iraqis having such biological weapons. Given what we've learned since about the claims for their capacity for weapons of mass destruction, in retrospect it makes Preston's clanging alarm bells seem like fearmongering, if not warmongering, and that's not the kind of thing I say lightly or often. Nevertheless I found this an absorbing and informative book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bethlea
Preston has a good blend of giving scientific explanations without burdening the non-scientist.
He tells a good story, starting from specific incident and then expanding to the science.
LibraryThing member cmc
Preston starts with the anthrax attack on American Media in Boca Raton, then bounces back and forth between the 2001 anthrax attacks there and in Washington (and the deaths of postal workers who handled the letters) and the lurking threat of smallpox being used as a biological weapon.

Smallpox is
Show More
one of the nastiest diseases to ever affect humans. Unlike many other diseases (such as influenza and ebola), smallpox only affects humans; any other reservoir species died off or the virus changed sufficiently that it can only live in humans. Because of the lack of a natural reservoir, the World Health Organization, with massive contributions from the U.S., the Soviet Union, and other countries, was able to eliminate it through a program of vaccination and encapsulation.

Officially, the smallpox virus only exists in two freezers, one in the United States, under the control of the National Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, the other in a lab called Vector in the Russian Federation. But Preston presents stories about Soviet weaponization of smallpox for use in ballistic missiles, and strongly suggests that samples of the virus, along with biologists who had worked on the weaponization programs, have been sold or taken to various “axis of evil” countries such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and others.

My feeling is that the terrorist emphasis is a bit overblown, but Preston’s interviews with veterans of the WHO eradication program and scientists working with anthrax, smallpox, ebola, and other serious disease organisms at the CDC and U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID, the descendant of U.S. military biowarfare research) make the book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ecw0647
I purchased this book for myself in e-book format to see how they work; quite well much to my surprise, at least in the RocketBook format.

Preston, author of the virus-based thriller Hot Zone examines the factual biological threat of smallpox, otherwise known as variola. There are poxviruses that
Show More
exist in almost all animal species, and one apparently crossed the species barrier several thousand years ago to become the most devastating killer of humans, superseding the plague by far. It's also one of the first diseases to have been officially completely eliminated from the world, except for two known storage points: one in the United States, the other in Russia.

Preston suggests that several rogue nations could be working on it as a biological weapon. The vaccinations most of us older folks received years ago are no longer immunizing, lasting only about five years.

The genome, i.e. letters of the genetic code, of variola is one of the longest of any virus and it has about two hundred genes. This complexity is used by the virus to defeat the immune system of the human host. The AIDS virus, in contrast, has only ten genes. "HIV is a bicycle, while smallpox is a Cadillac loaded with tailfins and every option in the book."

Preston is certain that smallpox will again be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world by terrorists. The virus floats through the air, traveling like lightning from victim to victim, a biological chain reaction. Studies done in a hospital in Meschede, Germany where a smallpox victim - he had arrived with the disease from outside the country - had been taken in 1970 showed that people could be infected even when they were outside the quarantine zone; it traveled much as smoke would throughout a building, even traveling into windows from the outside. The only way to stop it was massive vaccinations, which prevented the virus from moving outside the area.

The current vaccine produces serious adverse effects in a small number of those who receive it. It also might not be potent against a reengineered smallpox. Researchers have shown how easily the mousepox strain can be changed to become lethal to mice that normally are immune to it, - so easy, that an expert said a bright high school student could do it using publicly available information.

Conventional wisdom was that smallpox could not be transmitted into other non-human animals. It would be useful to induce the disease into other primates to be able to test newer forms of a vaccine. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that barrier was crossed May 31, 2001 when four monkeys were infected with one billion particles of smallpox virus. Two died. For the first time in history, a non-human animal had been infected with smallpox.

Smallpox had been declared completely eradicated in 1980, thanks to a heroic effort by the World Health Organization. Quite a controversy has surrounded the maintenance of the smallpox virus that has been kept potent in two storage facility freezers: one at the CDC in Atlanta, the other at a former germ-warfare facility in Siberia. The Russians had loaded tons of the virus into warheads during the eighties - thanks, guys - but these were to have been destroyed. Preston thinks that small amounts have been secreted out of the country into the hands of terrorist groups.

Preston interviewed Russian and American bioweapon experts who sit around and blithely discuss how easy it would be to create Armageddon, perhaps just by using a garden sprayer to deliver the disease particles. Air travel and constant movement around the planet would do the rest. Perhaps Bush should think about shutting down airports. Time to resurrect train travel, anyway.

Preston mixes anecdotes with science and detail to create a frightening view of a possible future, one much more lethal than nuclear war.

Just forget about sleeping if you read this book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member LovingLit
Concerning my reading, it is style over substance that I go for. If there happens to be beauty in both, I rate highly. This book was definitely substance first, style last. But the substance was so substantial it still gets a tick from me.

The Demon in the Freezer is in this case (I wonder how many
Show More
cases of there being demons in the freezer there are?) the smallpox virus. Officially eradicated in 1979, scientists kept specimens of the virus alive and frozen. With the increasing threat of terror invasions of the biological weapon type, there is now a school of thought that says all stocks of the virus should be destroyed so that it cannot fall into the wrong hands and be used against human populations. This virus is not a nice one. You can get if from someone easily and unknowingly before they even know they have it, and for ten days after they show the first flu-like symptoms. Its spread in today's interwoven societies would be exponential. You die in pain and slowly if you are the one in three that it is likely to kill. This is all before the notion that stocks of the smallpox virus are probably held in freezers in Iraq, North Korea and other states of questionable repute. That they could be being modified on a genetic level to resist vaccines is of great concern to scientists and governments around the world.

Concerns about other biological weapons are discussed here too, in particular anthrax which was distributed post 9/11 via the mail in the US and proved to be both deadly to those who were exposed to its spores, and very costly to clean up after.

On a more lighthearted note, my favourite part of the book follows:

"Pox hunters have so far discovered mousepox, monkeypox, skunkpox, pigpox, goatpox, camelpox, cowpox, pseudo-cowpox, buffalopox, gerbilpox, several deerpoxes, chamoispox, a couple of sealpoxes, turkeypox, canarypox, pigeonpox, starlingpox, peacockpox, sparrowpox, juncopox, mynahpox, quailpox, parrotpox and toadpox........There's dolphinpox, penguinpox, two kangaroopoxes, raccoonpox and quokkapox........snakepox and crocpox."

But fear not, only the animal in the title gets the virus just as smallpox only uses humans as its host. This was a fast and fantastic read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member mojomomma
A very scary look at how easily the smallpox virus could be used as a bioterrorism agent.
LibraryThing member BookConcierge
Preston is a journalist and first-rate writer. Here he focuses his investigation on the small pox virus - which, having been virtually eradicated from the natural world, is still stockpiled in the freezers of several nations. This is non-fiction that reads like the best medical thriller.
Show More
Fascinating and chilling.
Show Less
LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
Preston's exploration of Smallpox and its potential threat as a weapon of bio-terrorism is powerful, and still timely (having been published originally in 2002). Through a narrative that reads as smoothly as fiction, and with just enough detail when it comes to history and explanation, he makes a
Show More
clear case for the fact that smallpox is far more frightening than many threats we hear of more regularly, allowing his book to be all the more powerful because he sets his main focus up against the anthrax scares that were so present in the public mind upon this book's first publication. The message: 'You're afraid of anthrax, but you're worrying about the wrong thing." Of course, this isn't a book built for the scientists who are choosing where to focus their grants or funding. This is a book meant for the average person who can't help wondering what bioterrorism could mean, how it could show up, how we can fight it when it does, and whether smallpox is really a thing of the past.

The difficult thing about this book, truthfully, is remembering while reading that Preston is presenting history and fact, because it is so easy to read, and the characters are so well-drawn and clear that this doesn't feel like a book of facts, names, and potentialities--it feels like a story. And, of course, it is, albeit a true one.

There's no doubt that this book has the potential to give readers nightmares if they stop at the wrong moment or allow it to sink into their brains too close to bedtime, but it's worth reading for anyone who wants some insight into the subjects at hand, and it's certainly a book I'd recommend. I'll be looking up more of Preston's work, no doubt.
Show Less
LibraryThing member catzkc
Long story short: Smallpox. Bioterrorism. Forget about your potty debates. We're all doomed. The end.

However, I do highly recommend reading the longer version! Just beware, it may make for some sleepless nights and/or paranoia.

Notes from my 2013 attempt at reading the book: Good book, just scares
Show More
the hell out of me! Hopefully I can gather my wits about me enough to be able to finish this one day!
Show Less
LibraryThing member Scorched_Earth
Quite a well written and frightening account of weaponized smallpox and anthrax. His previous book, The Hot Zone is a much better read.

Awards

LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — Science & Technology — 2002)
ALA Outstanding Books for the College Bound (Science & Technology — 2004)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

2002

Physical description

5.67 inches

ISBN

0375419535 / 9780375419539

Barcode

0100088

Similar in this library

Page: 3.4745 seconds