Remember the eponymous Alien in the movie? Remember when the Alien attached himself to that guy’s face, then grew in his intestines and gnawed his way out? Yuk! He wasn’t at all like those almond-eyed little aliens that Spielberg dreamed up for Close Encounters of the Third Kind , or the kind that people draw when they are explaining what critters abducted them and examined their genitals. Unh, uh, that Alien was one nasty sucker, who could eat you from the outside in or the inside out.
Fortunately, these are movie aliens, or aliens formed in the imaginations of people who have a repressed wish to have their genitalia examined. Real aliens like that would be a close encounter that would be, to use the vernacular, sooo not cool. But just when you suspend your willing suspension of disbelief along comes Richard Preston with his book, The Demon in the Freezer , and you realize that there are some really nasty aliens out there, only they are so small we can’t see if they have almond eyes and three-fingered hands (for groping human genitalia) at the ends of spindly arms.
Viruses, that’s what these aliens are, and they are looking for some nice hosts to eat their way through. If you turn out to be the “planet” they are invading, you could be in for a bad time and an early worse ending. Preston wrote about Ebola virus in his earlier book, The Hot Zone; in this one he revisits one of the most lethal viruses in history—small pox.
Small pox, you say? You thought we had eradicated small pox. Most people alive today don’t even remember that it wiped out more people on 1918-1919 that World War I did. In fact, this biological scourge was wiped out. Sixty years after the last big plague of it, small pox languished only in two freezers, one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and the other in a Virology institute in Russia. Why the last of these bugs were not consigned to the flames probably owes much to the tendency of the people who like to make wars to hold onto anything they think might give them and edge, and a little something under the table if they have a ready buyer.
Small pox was eradicated, thanks to the courage and dedication of troops of vaccinators who went anywhere in the world where there it broke out, cordoned the area off and kept it contained until it imploded. But the Americans just couldn’t bring themselves to exterminate their lab supply thanks to specious arguments that it was a “species” that needed to be kept for study purposes. The Russian took t weaponizing the stuff by the ton, and now we don’t know how much of it might have ended up in the lethal little hands of some nasty people.
We shouldn’t think that the good ole US of A as less culpable in such stupidity. At the end of WWII American military medical personnel were eager to get their grubbies on the bio-weapon research that had been conducted by the nefarious Unit 731 [1] of the Japanese Army. This was the unit that conducted experiments on live subjects (including their subsequent vivisection!) using a wide variety of bio- and chemical weapons. Most of their victims were Chinese, but there were also Russian and American subjects. Rather than prosecute and execute these vicious murderers the US Army let them off in return for the fruits of their “research”.
Never mind that idiot George Bush is out there crushing entire countries looking for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, there are terrorists of mass extermination waiting to be unleashed, waiting to be rubbed on a door handle at Grand Central Station, or a counter at Heathrow airport, or the bathroom faucets of a 747. The terrorist who may end up doing you in will not be wearing a balaclava or turban, but will be that guy in an Armani suit who coughed or sneezed three places ahead of you in line, or your own kid, or husband or wife coming home from work or school. There’s a titanic struggle taking place between armies in bio-hazard suits in labs in the US, in Russia, Australia, and who knows where. Some are cooking up vaccine-resistant bugs and the others are in a desperate rush to counter with new vaccines. Once it breaks out, you won’t want to be near anybody. Everybody will be a potential alien vector. One particular paragraph caught this urbanist’s attention. “Epidemiologists have done some mathematics on the spread of smallpox, and they’ve found that the virus needs a population of around two hundred thousand people living within fourteen days travel from one another or the virus can’t keep its life cycle going, and it dies out. Those conditions did not occur until the appearance of settled agricultural areas and cities, about seven thousand years ago. Smallpox could be described as the first urban virus.” (p. 66)
We may console ourselves with the march of biology since small pox wiped out millions in our grandparents’ day, but don’t count on it. Not only in nature cooking up SARS and H5N1 bird influenzas, but the bugs themselves are getting smarter; they have to if they want to survive.[2] When they begin to exterminate one species they have to learn to jump species, to go “pneumonic” and let the hosts provide a free ride one to the other. Read Preston’s account of the symptoms of a student nurse who contracted hemorrhagic smallpox (Pp. 48-53) and one might prefer a terrorist attack that is an instantaneous atomizing flash of nuclear explosive, or even a quick chomp by the drooling mouth of that movie Alien.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.23.2005)
[1] Unit 731 Testimony , by Hal Gold, a book, ironically, that I purchased in Kyoto, Japan was a real eye-opener. Check it out at Amazon.com where there is a limited minor literature on this subject.
[2] Bird flu may have already found a way around the only vaccine available, Tamiflu, since recent vaccinations in Vietnam failed to prevent death (and manufacturer Roche’s stock took a dive with the news of it).