Case in the 50s in the USSR
In the early morning at the very end of December 1959, a plane landed at the Vnukovo airport with the famous artist Alexei Kokorekin. The artist flew in from India a day earlier than planned, passed border and customs control and drove home to his mistress. He coughed a little, but who would you surprise by coughing in December Moscow?
Giving gifts from warm exotic countries to his passion, the next day he finally got to his family, hugged his family, celebrated his arrival and also gave out gifts. The cough intensified, the temperature rose and he went to the doctors.
They hospitalized him almost immediately - he literally felt worse before his eyes. And by the evening he died. The autopsy pathologist invited Academician N. A. Kraevsky, head of the department, to the sectional hall. By a lucky coincidence, an old pathologist from Leningrad came to visit Nikolai Alexandrovich, he was invited to a section table. The old man looked at the corpse and said - "Yes, my friend, variola vera - smallpox" ...
By that time, even the doctors had almost forgotten about the existence of a terrible disease that mowed down cities and countries in the Middle Ages in our country. In the USSR, the disease was overcome by universal vaccination in 1936. Doctors did not even think that it could return, and stopped taking it into account.
But not in India, where he was visited by a famous Soviet artist, twice the Stalin Prize winner Alexei Kokorekin. It was there, in one of the Indian provinces, at the ceremony of burning the Brahmin who died of smallpox, the artist caught a terrible infection.
The seriousness of the events became clear already on the second day: the virus was diagnosed by an employee of the hospital reception, who received the artist, examining his doctor and even a teenager, who was in the same hospital a floor below, right at the ventilation hole from Kokorekin’s ward. The hospital stoker picked up smallpox, just walking past the ward.
Two weeks later, in already 1960, some patients of the Botkin Hospital appeared the same as Kokorekin: fever, cough and rash. The material taken from the skin of one of the patients was sent to the Research Institute of Vaccines and Serums. On January 15, 1960, Academician Morozov revealed particles of variola virus in the material. The news was quickly reported to the country's top leadership.
It became clear that Moscow and the entire Soviet Union are one step away from an epidemic of a disease that is not being treated.
By the afternoon, at a meeting near Khrushchev, a set of urgent measures had been taken to prevent an epidemic of smallpox. The personnel of the Moscow police and the KGB were tasked with identifying as soon as possible all who the artist had contact with, starting from the moment he boarded the plane in India. At risk were passengers of the aircraft, its crew, customs officers, colleagues, friends, relatives.
The investigation even established that before returning home, Kokorekin spent a day with his mistress. The scope of work was enormous. It turned out that for several weeks the patient was in contact with several thousand people. It was almost impossible to identify everyone.
The KGB of the USSR, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Health established and isolated absolutely everyone who at least somehow intersected with the infected. One of the patients who spent the evening was a teacher at the institute, where she took exams from numerous students - hundreds of people were immediately sent from the university to quarantine. Gifts brought from India for his wife and mistress through the commission on Shabolovka and Leninsky crawled around the city, but after a day all the visitors to the stores were installed, quarantined, and items from Indian fabrics were burned.
The central Botkin hospital is immediately under siege. Thousands of patients and attendants cannot leave its walls. Trucks with everything necessary leave the mobilization vaults of the State Reserve in the direction of Moscow. They managed to deploy a plane over Europe, which sent one of the passengers of the Cocorekin flight from Moscow to Paris.
Moscow, which had just celebrated the New Year, was actually completely closed under the laws of wartime. It was neither possible to enter nor leave it: the flights were canceled, the railway connection was interrupted, roads were blocked. Day and night, medical teams drove to addresses, hospitalizing more and more likely carriers of infection.
In the infectious diseases hospitals, more and more quarantine beds were placed, and in a week about 10 thousand people were already under the supervision of doctors. The thread to which began only with one passenger of the Delhi-Moscow flight.
At the same time, the second phase of the operation to combat a possible epidemic was launched - an urgent vaccination of the population. Within 3 days, 10 million doses of anti-fowl vaccine were delivered by air from the Tomsk, Tashkent Vaccine and Serum Institutes and the Krasnodar Territory Sanitary and Epidemiological Station to the Moscow City Sanitary and Epidemiological Station. And medical workers of absolutely all enterprises and institutions of the city pricked his Muscovites and guests of the capital.
RESULTS: A total of 19 people were infected from Kokorekin during this outbreak in Moscow (7 relatives, 9 staff and 3 patients in the hospital, to which he was hospitalized with unrecognized smallpox). Another 23 people were infected from them, and three more from the latter. 3 out of 46 infected have died.
In 1960, all 7 million residents of Moscow were vaccinated. Inoculated, including the dying. Each week, 1.5 million people were injected, and 10 thousand vaccination teams were vaccinated, which in addition to doctors and paramedics included students of medical schools. After a month, the outbreak of smallpox was able to repay.
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