Former CIA Director Praises Novel "Deadly Pages" Smallpox Threat Assessment
Naples, Florida (PRWEB) June 28, 2016 -- The terrorist threat of a smallpox attack on the U.S., as plotted in the new fictional thriller, Deadly Pages, was described as "credible" by Porter Goss, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Goss is also former chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
In his message to the author, Leslie Norins, M.D., Ph.D., Mr. Goss said, "This assessment of the danger of smallpox seems credible to me, and the means of delivery through the New York Times is creative. Chem/Bio warfare is a serious threat that requires constant attention."
Dr. Norins said one of his purposes in writing the novel was to increase public awareness of the possibility of a terroristic attack with smallpox occurring in an unexpected way, such that current contingency plans for coping with a simple attack would be overwhelmed. He hopes that renewed consideration will be given to administering protective smallpox vaccinations to a wide segment of first responders and hospital staffs, especially doctors and nurses in emergency departments.
Dr. Norins, a veteran medical publisher who trained as a physician scientist with the Nobel Prize winner in immunology, and then directed a major laboratory at CDC, notes that routine smallpox vaccination of all schoolchildren was halted around 1980, following the eradication of naturally occurring smallpox.
But in 1999, a Soviet defector reported that a secret Russian bioweapons program had produced "tons" of the lethal smallpox virus. After that revelation, in 2003 a government program vaccinated about 38,000 American "first responders". But Dr. Norins says that today few know who or where these people are. He adds that in the 13 years since that effort, the immunity of these few individuals to smallpox has waned; it is most effective for about three years.
In "Deadly Pages", which Dr. Norins labels “Fiction, based on facts”, a Mideast terrorist group grows smallpox virus after obtaining starter supplies from rogue Russians. They plan to disseminate the virus to unsuspecting Americans by a unique method--contaminating the pages of the New York Times, so readers will become infected. Luckily, a heroic American, Dr. Martin Riker, is able to infiltrate the gang in Syria, and stop the plan at the last minute, in New York.
“Deadly Pages is a masterly suspense novel with a credible scenario related by a medical scientist who really knows what he is talking about,” commented Sir Gustav Nossal, a leading Australian medical scientist, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. “It’s a compulsive must read.”
About Leslie Norins, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Norins has over 50 years of medical research and medical publishing experience. He trained with the Nobel Prize winner in immunology and directed a major laboratory at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and was then responsible for launching more than 80 medical newsletters that reached hundreds of thousands of specialized healthcare professionals worldwide.
Dr. Norins earned his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, his M.D. from Duke University School of Medicine, and his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, where he was a postdoctoral fellow of Nobel Laureate Sir Macfarlane Burnet. He was also elected a Fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America, and has served on committees of the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. Originally from Baltimore, Dr. Norins now lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.
Deadly Pages is co-authored with Thomas Hauck, published by Medvostat, LLC, and available now in bookstores and from Amazon.com (paperback and Kindle).
More information on the book, its authors, and the threat of a smallpox terror attack are available at
http://deadlypages.com.
For review copy requests and media inquiries, contact info(at)DeadlyPages(dot)com.
Public Relations, Medvostat LLC, http://www.deadlypages.com, +1 (239) 649-1346, [email protected]
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