The Demon in the Freezer
Richard Preston
240 pages, including glossary
published in 2002

Shortly after the September 11 2001 attacks on the New york World Trade Center and the Pentagon, envelopes with a strange powder were mailed to various politicians and media figures. On examination this powder turned out to be anthrax and several people died as the result of having handled the envelopes. It was the first real bioterrorism case. But terrifying as it was for the people targeted with the anthrax envelopes, it was actually quite a pathetic attempt. Anthrax it seems, just doesn't make a very scary or effective terror weapon. It doesn't work fast enough, doesn't spread fast enough and it takes a lot of exposure to kill you.

Smallpox has none of those disadvantages. It is very contagious, spreads through the air rather than direct contact and over the centuries has killed literally millions if not billions of people. And it has one other major advantage: thanks to the successful eradication campaign run by the World Health Organisation, smallpox has become extinct in the wild, most nations ahve destryed their stocks of vaccine and there is now a virgin population for the virus to exploit, as few people today will have a natural immunity to it...

That in short is the central, terrifying question raised by Richard Preston in The Demon in the Freezer. Preston is of course the author of The Hot Zone, which made Ebola a household word. With The Demon in the Freezer he attempted to do the same with smallpox.

According to Preston, the tipping point happened on December 9, 1979, when the last smallpox patient on Earth was declared cured and smallpox ceased to exist in nature. If at that moment the smallpox stocks held by various countries like the USSR or the USA had been destroyed, the threat of smallpox would've been gone forever. Instead, it turned out that the USSR at least used smallpox for biological warfare and when the USSR collapsed, stocks of this weaponised smallpox may have been sold to other countries, or stolen...

A worrying thought, especially since it turns out this smallpox variant is even more lethal and contagious than the natural variants and there are basically no stocks left of smallpox vaccine...

Preston makes it all sound chillingly plausible; The Demon in the Freezer reads like a technothriller at times. However, this book is more than just carnography because Preston also focuses on the history of smallpox and the attempts to eradicate it. It is this which makes this an interesting read beyond its current post-911 revelance.