By: Caroline B. Cooney Ben Jackson

It starts with little brown dots on your skin called Macules Macules raise up into a bumps called papules 3-4 days later the papules would form into blisters called pustules A patient who had smallpox would be totally covered with pustules especially on the hands, face and feet Several days later the pustules would pop and bleed and scabb over It would take around 6 days for one scab to fall off When the scabs fall off they would leave a hole in your skin called a pock If your skin was covered with pocks you would look hideous If you didn’t die from the smallpox themselves you would die from other diseases that would enter through the pocks You would get infected from coughing or hand touching For days after you got infected nothing would be wrong with you and you wouldn’t be infectious Once you started to get sick it happened really fast After being sick for a while you would almost be in a come or be going crazy Almost all patients with smallpox had white fur on their tongues, nausea and bad breath Smallpox vaccination is cowpox because that is a non lethal pox and it prevents you from getting any other pox including smallpox In 1965 Donald Henderson was put in charge of destroying smallpox and to do that every time their was an outbreak his team would go their and immunize everyone around them for up to a mile and didn’t let anyone leave till the smallpox was gone In 1977 smallpox was completely gone

Code orange is a book set in New York City its main character is Mitty Blake a carefree slacker in an advanced biology class (that his parents payed for him to get into). The book starts when Mr. Lynch asks for a bibliography containing four books for their infectious diseases project that started four months ago (which Mitty hasn’t started). This bibliography also decides whether or not Mitty can stay in that class with Olivia and Derek (his best friends). That night his family goes on their weekend trip to their house in the country where Mitty picks out four books that have to do with the disease called Variola Major also known as Small Pox. When he opens one of the books a yellow envelope falls out that says “scabs – VM epidemic 1902, Boston” he opens the envelope and sees three scabs he then pours them into his hand to look at them while breathing in the scab dust he then packs them scabs back in the envelope in the book and put it and the three other books in his backpack. Mitty reads more about smallpox in his books over the next few days and realises that after breathing in the scabs he might have Small Pox. Mitty starts to get worried and posts messages on the internet asking people if he might have smallpox after breathing in the scabs he gets many replies but none of them help him. Mitty knows that soon he will start infecting people if he has it because it is close to the twelfth day. Mitty loves New York and to prevent anybody else from getting smallpox he writes a suicide note on his laptop telling his parents everything about what happened with the scabs..

Later that day as Mitty is walking in Central Park he plans to delete the note on his laptop but instead someone calls him over and says that they read his notes on the internet and want to test him for smallpox. Mitty agrees and later wakes up in the basement of a warehouse. After staying down there for several days Mitty decides to try to escape, first he jams a nail into the lock then he covers himself in little spots made of coal that look like Macules and starts to make himself puke. When the kidnappers come down to see Mitty, they tell him that they’re going to use Mitty to spread smallpox everywhere. Since they think Mitty is now too weak to even stand up they don’t bring any weapons down with them. Since Mitty faked the puking and Macules he attacks them and slams the door to the basement shut. The bioterrorists can’t open the door anymore because of the nail so they are stuck with Mitty in the basement. Mitty takes his shirt off and stuffs it into a furnace pipe so carbon monoxide starts to fill the basement. A couple of hours later Mitty is dragged upstairs half asleep from the carbon monoxide and left by an open door as the two other terrorists go down to retrieve their partners that were stuck in the basement. Read to find out what will happen next and if Mitty will catch smallpox or not.