Everybody lies

A book about the dangers of biological warfare. Using the example of smallpox, one of the most terrifiying viruses on earth, Preston describes the threat posed by modern bioterrorism. Not a very uplifting book, I can tell you.

I quite liked it anyway, because, as I have stated oftentimes before, I have a thing for apocalyptical tales about the demise of humankind. That this one is supposedly a true story doesn’t make it any less entertaining for me.

Smallpox were officially eradicated from nature in 1978 through a worldwide vaccination effort. But some small stores of the virus remained in several labs, ostensibly for research purposes (Yeah, right. Reading that, one has to ask oneself, what’s to study when there are no naturally occuring cases anymore?). After the end of the cold war scientists feared that the virus would fall into the wrong hands and terrorists would, with the help of genetic engineering, construct a powerful bioweapon from it. One against which no existing vaccine would work.

According to Preston, this is exactly what has happened and the question is not so much if anybody will ever use it, but rather when that will happen.

The terrifying thing about smallpox - apart from the way the disease kills, which is explained in the book in gruesome detail - is that human beings are the only host for this particular virus. This fact, which was the one that made the eradication of the naturally occuring virus possible in the first place, is at the same time the biggest obstacle to developing effective vaccines against it. Because animal tests don’t work here, and you can’t obviously just infect humans with the virus and then try out new vaccines on them. I must admit, though, I do have a problem of seeing the point of developing a vaccine if they don’t even know the particular strain of virus yet. But once more, this conundrum appeals to my sense of irony.

Preston paints a very grim picture of our future, but I don’t doubt that it is true.

Somebody somewhere has got stores of genetically engineered viruses (the book mentions twenty tons of “hot,” genetically altered smallpox that went missing from russian labs and are suspected to have ended up somewhere in the Middle East - no big surprise there).

And somebody will someday deploy it for a terrorist attack - given the human predilection for unbelievable stupidity on a large scale, it’s just inevitable. And I guess we all know which country will probably be the first target of such an attack. Not that that is much of a consolation for the rest of us on the other side of the world, because a virus like that will spread like wildfire through today’s ultramobile society.

So, our future seems to look pretty bleak. If it’s not smallpox, then it’ll probably be some other virus that gets us. It’s all just a matter of time.

But, of course, as an average person there is not much you can do about all that - so why worry about it? I suppose, the one thing you can learn from this book is to live your life as if every day might be your last. Because, frankly, this is exactly the case.

So, can I recommend this book as a good read? It certainly was interesting and entertaining for me. If you, on the other hand, do scare easily or have a predilection for paranoia, you better go and read something less depressing.