Acquire Scourge: The Once And Future Threat Of Smallpox Generated By Jonathan B. Tucker Contained In Version

a public health nerd such as myself, a book that details the eradication of smallpox in the world is a great read, It was informative and interesting to learn about how it all happened and the various players involved, I read about/to/and then skimmed the rest, as it was actually TOO much detail for me, If you want to know EVERY twist and turn and nook and cranny, this certainly has it, I didn't particularly care for the writing style, but it wasn't terrible or difficult to follow, All in all, I think that puts me atstars, A book that is broken intoparts, a brief history of smallpox , which is well done, the bulk of the book then deals with the WOrld Health Organization successful attempt to eradicate smallpox, this is when the book really drags, the read turns into a slog as it simply deals with the Bureaucratic wrangling and the reader finds themselves in their own Kafka nightmare, as the book goes into depth describing how one country eliminated a smallpox, It then repeats a near identical story how the WHO tackles smallpox in a another country, the book becomes too dry.
Finally the book speculates on the potential of a smallpox bio terrorist attack, The book is an interesting topic that is spoiled by the author turning it into a dreary repetitive exercise, super interested. Scourge is an informative, wellresearched, and surprisingly readable overview of the history of smallpox, I was fascinated by early anecdotes of the disease and its treatment and found new heroes in the detailed chronicle of the intensified and ultimately successful global eradication campaign from the 's and 's.
I found it difficult to get through the subsequent chapters covering the debate over whether to destroy the remaining laboratory samples, but I suspect that had more to do with my personal distaste for politics than the author's writing.
After that brief uninteresting interlude, I was once again gripped by the development of smallpox as a biological weapon especially the chapter describing a pretend attack against a fictional US city.
I borrowed Scourge from the library, but I will definitely be buying a copy for my 'horrible diseases' collection,

I would recommend Scourge to anyone who has an interest in learning more about infectious diseases, smallpox, eradication, or bioweapons, Even squeamish people should be okay, as the book focuses on history rather than gruesome clinical details, and there are no pictures, Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox, by Jonathan Tucker, is an excellent primer on the long, gory history of a disease thats not well understood today, even though it was doing damage since ancient times.
Tucker takes the reader through Edward Jennings amazing discovery, through the worldwide eradication of the disease under the auspices of WHO, through the international debate as to whether or not to destroy the remaining stores of the virus, then lastly discusses the potential of the smallpox virus to be used as a biological weapon.


This is such a fascinating and accessible yet concise book, To learn of the many people involved in the concerted, coordinated and heroic effort to wipe out this horrific disease, culminating in the triumphantdeclaration that the disease had been eradicated from the earth, is nothing short of awesome.
Its also extremely scary to consider that rogue states and stateless actors could get a hold of the virus and create a chimeral doomsday plague, The first half was very interesting and focused on the actual eradication, The second half is very political focusing on what's been going on since it was considered eradicated, This is neither a particularly good nor a particularly bad history of smallpox throughout history, the creation of the first vaccine, the campaign to end smallpox infections, and finally the campaign to destroy the last remaining samples of the disease.
If you've read anything about this subject before, you won't find anything new or exciting in here, In fact, the information is a bit dated having been published over a decade ago, it can't comment on anything that has happened since: terrorist attacks, supposed WMDs in Iraq, subsequent wars, etc.
If you read only one book on smallpox, you might want to choose one that was written a bit more recently, So far at about halfway through, this is just all right, I thought it would have more historical information, but most of the book is about the eradication efforts in the midth Century, which I already was fairly familiar with.
So far, I'd pick almost any other pestilence book besides this one, This was a fascinating, enlightening look at the history of small pox, The story is basically three acts, I: in antiquity, II: combating and defeat of small box, and III: political impediments to destroying remaining stockpiles, III is rather tedious and even disheartening, II stood out the most to me with Soviet Russia's successful internationalist instigation for a global effort to wipe out the disease and the engineering solutions of the US Army's sitelinkjet injector and the sitelinkbifurcated needle used during the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication campaign fromto.
A sublime chronicle of the spread of smallpox and the subsequent efforts to eradicate it,

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was in the early stage of smallpox when he gave the Gettysburg Address Did you know that even during the most chilling years of the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union collaborated in the smallpox eradication campaign

These amazing facts are just a tiny bit of the information in the book Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox by Jonathan B.
Tucker.

It begins with the origins of the disease, the first hosts of which were rodents, African hunters got the virus by eating infected animals, but the virus died out quickly because the communities were small and isolated, With the growth of population and increasing interaction between continents, the virus started to spread,

It's hard to expect a detailed account from a broad overview, clearly targeting people with no prior knowledge of the disease, However, the author did go into specifics around chapter eight, And that's when the book lost its appeal to me, The narrative got bogged with politics, focusing on the mistrust between the countries, every superpower or aspiring superpower suspecting that its counterparts were using smallpox to create biological weapons.
One chapter was dedicated to the efforts of the Soviet Union in this regard aka making biological weapons another underscored grumbles within different departments of the American government.
I still managed to get to chapter twelve and was surprised to hear about a learning experiment at the beginning of thest century: an outbreak of highly contagious smallpox in the USA caused by a terrorist bioattack.
The description of the experiment reads like it was written in, with its lack of vaccines, civil unrest, and even a black market of fake vaccination certificates,

What a pity we don't learn from history! I also remember reading about an experiment at Pearl Harbor conducted ten years beforethat showed unpreparedness against air bombardment.


It was an audiobook, I don't know how other listeners write down people's or organizations' names after hearing them, I struggled during the whole book to understand what organization the author meant: it sounded like See Double U Chow, It turned out to be WHO, Follows the smallpox eradication program and events subsequent, Interesting read, however, I expected more on the eradication campaign, More than half the book discusses the aftermath of eradication and a hefty chunk of this records sociopolitical ramifications in laborious detail,.stars, really. A frightening account of the failure of both the US, USSR and the global health community to irradicate Smallpox and the very real and forgotten dangers its existence still poses to human health.

Not for the faint of heart as some of the descriptions can be quite gruesome, Interesting topic I like unusual medical stuff and am one of those weirdos who watches videos of people pulling bot flies from their body,
The political dynamics involving the efforts to eradicate small pox was too detailed for me so I skimmed much of that, Pretty dry.
If you were born afterit's highly likely you didn't get a small pox vaccine, Also, vaccines are generally only good foryears or so as evidenced by whooping cough pertussis outbreaks here in Ann Arbor in the past years, So next time you get a tetnus shot, make sure it has a pertussis vaccine in it too, DNF.

sitelinkSmallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer A virus ahem can turn the course of history.


Smallpox was once a threat and still is a threat, . . it is chilling to read about the corners of the world that still hold the smallpox virus, as well as the laboratories that keep some in stock for research purposes.
By almost eradicating this disease, the population has become more vulnerable, Smallpox is also high on the list of viruses that can be used or modified as biological weapons,

Scary book, gruesome and gripping, Disease has done more to shape human society than war, and smallpox remains one of those powerful forces, still lurking, waiting, a tiny powerful threat,

There is much to enjoy here in terms of medical history and science, The history of vaccines too is tied up with smallpox because the smallpox vaccine was successful and has over many decades been proven to work,

Fascinating book. So many facets of history can be viewed through the lens of smallpox, There are lessons to be learned here, about diligence, prudence, and caution, Reading this book frominwas a trip, Living through the COVIDglobal pandemic in real time, it was interesting to me to see the author's predictions pertaining to a future pandemic smallpox in this case, but similar in many ways in terms of how the world reacts to it.
Much of what the author projected was accurate, but they also missed some things namely the rise of antivax/antiprotection sentiment that I think could have been foreseen given the hesitancy around vaccines and protections encountered when smallpox was endemic.
Regardless of these details, though, it was both refreshing and depressing to read this book at this point in history, Refreshing because it was nice to know that humans haven't just become terrible and

selfish in the past handful of years: people reacted selfishly to the spread of smallpox, too.
Depressing because SO MUCH OF THIS COULD BE FORESEEN AND THE US DID NOTHING, Smallpox was a far greater killer than the plague, but is fading from memory after its successful elimination, This wellwritten book covers the history and the suspenseful drive to risky variolation, safer vaccination, and the eventual end to the scourge, Smallpox killed about/of its victims and is easily spread by inhalation, Names like D. A. Henderson are now not well known, but should be, for freeing humanity of its greatest viral killer, At a small cost, smallpox was isolated and destroyed via efforts of the WHO and member states, including the USSR and USA who managed to cooperate in this one vital area during the Cold War.


The later part of this book focuses on the aftermath of the seeming end of smallpox, A secret and illegal Soviet biological weapons program worked to develop a supersmallpox and continued through the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, The US and Soviet Union held the only two remaining live smallpox viruses, ostensibly for scientific research,

For decades, much of the world has demanded these final stocks be destroyed, finally freeing the Earth of the killer, Yet, the superpowers have been caught in the classic prisoner's dilemma, unsure the other would really destroy all their stocks, given the possible military advantage, Some scientists want to retain the virus in anticipation that another virus, such as monkeypox, will evolve into the void left by smallpox, Concerns about mislaid smallpox cultures, forgotten in a vial in some academic freezer, or held in secret by a rogue state, colored the debate, In fact, this book touches on the topic of Iraq, which was thought to have WMD, likely including smallpox, which was one of the reasons for the Second Iraq War.
Lastly, there is a fear smallpox could be reintroduced by digging up a victim buried in the permafrost,

The book ends on a bittersweet note, Eradicating smallpox was an epidemiological grand achievement, But, in the unlikely event the American or Soviet stocks are ever breached, or smallpox is released by a terrorist, the world is less prepared than it was because immunity fades quickly, and the world has a dreadfully low vaccination supply.
Could smallpox be reintroduced If so, a smallpox pandemic might lead to tens or even hundreds of millions of deaths, Which is why I think the final known viral stocks should be destroyed, .