Early in the morning at the very end of December 1959, a plane with the famous artist Alexei Kokorekin landed at Vnukovo Airport. The artist had arrived from India a day earlier than planned, passed through border and customs control, and went home to his mistress. He was coughing a little, but who would be surprised by a cough in December Moscow?
Having presented his passion with gifts from warm exotic countries, the next day he finally got to his family, hugged his relatives, celebrated his arrival, and also handed out gifts. The cough was getting worse, his temperature was rising, and he went to the doctors.
He was hospitalized almost immediately - he was getting worse literally before our eyes. And by evening he died. The pathologist who performed the autopsy invited the head of the department, Academician N. A. Kraevsky, to the dissection room. By a lucky chance, an old pathologist from Leningrad came to visit Nikolai Alexandrovich, and he was invited to the autopsy table.
The old man looked at the corpse and said,
"Yes, my dear fellow, this is variola vera - smallpox"...
By that time, even doctors in our country had almost forgotten about the existence of the most terrible disease that mowed down cities and countries in the Middle Ages. In the USSR, the disease was overcome by universal vaccination back in 1936. Doctors did not even think that it could return, and stopped taking it into account. But not in India, where the famous Soviet artist, two-time Stalin Prize laureate Alexei Kokorekin visited.
It was there, in one of the Indian provinces, at a ceremony to cremate a Brahmin who had died of smallpox, that the artist contracted the terrible infection.
The seriousness of the events became clear on the second day: the virus was diagnosed in the hospital receptionist who had received the artist, the doctor who examined him, and even a teenager who was in the same hospital one floor below, right next to the ventilation hole from Kokorekin's room. The hospital stoker contracted smallpox simply by walking past the room.
Two weeks later, in 1960, some patients at the Botkin Hospital developed the same symptoms as Kokorekin: fever, cough, and rash. 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 discovered particles of the smallpox virus in the material. The news was promptly reported to the country's top leadership. It became clear that Moscow and the entire Soviet Union were one step away from an epidemic of a disease that had no cure.
By the afternoon, a set of urgent measures had been adopted at a meeting with Khrushchev to prevent a smallpox epidemic.
The personnel of the capital's police and the KGB were tasked with identifying everyone with whom the artist had been in contact, starting from the moment he boarded the plane to India, as soon as possible. The risk group included passengers of the plane, its crew, customs officers, colleagues, friends, and relatives. The investigation even established that before returning home, Kokorekin had spent a day with his mistress.
The scale of the work was enormous. It was found that over the course of several weeks, the patient had been in contact with several thousand people. It was practically impossible to identify everyone. The KGB of the USSR, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Ministry of Health identified and isolated absolutely everyone who had in any way crossed paths with the infected person. One of those who spent the evening with the patient was a teacher at the institute, where she administered exams to numerous students - hundreds of people were immediately sent from the university into quarantine.
Gifts brought from India for the wife and mistress through second-hand shops on Shabolovka and Leninsky spread throughout the city, but within 24 hours all the visitors to the shops were identified, quarantined, and the items made from Indian fabrics were burned.
The Central Botkin Hospital immediately found itself under siege.
Thousands of patients and service personnel could not leave its walls.
Trucks with everything they needed left the mobilization storage facilities of the State Reserve towards Moscow.
They managed to turn back the plane over Europe, which was carrying one of the passengers of the Kokorekin flight from Moscow to Paris. Moscow, which had just celebrated the New Year, was practically completely closed according to the laws of wartime. It was impossible to enter or leave it: flights were cancelled, rail service was interrupted, and roads were blocked. Medical teams traveled to addresses around the clock, hospitalizing more and more potential carriers of the infection.
In infectious disease hospitals, more and more beds were set up for quarantine patients, and in a week, about 10 thousand people were already under the supervision of doctors. The thread to which began with just one passenger on a Delhi-Moscow flight.
At the same time, the second phase of the operation to combat a possible epidemic was launched - urgent vaccination of the population.
Over the course of 3 days, 10 million doses of smallpox vaccine were delivered by plane to the Moscow City Sanitary and Epidemiological Station from the Tomsk and Tashkent Institutes of Vaccines and Serums and the Krasnodar Regional Sanitary and Epidemiological Station. And medical workers from absolutely all enterprises and institutions in the city injected Muscovites and guests of the capital with it.
Results
RESULTS: In total, 19 people were infected by Kokorekin during this outbreak in Moscow (7 relatives, 9 staff members, and 3 patients of the hospital where he was hospitalized with undiagnosed smallpox). Another 23 people were infected from them, and three more from the latter. Three of the 46 infected died. In 1960, all 7 million residents of Moscow were vaccinated. The dying were also vaccinated.
Every week, 1.5 million people were injected, and 10 thousand vaccination teams were vaccinated, which included medical students in addition to doctors and paramedics.
A month later, the smallpox outbreak was extinguished
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