Janet Parker had a splitting headache. A migraine, she thought, as she knocked off work early on Friday afternoon, August 11, 1978, and headed home to the duplex she shared with her husband on Burford Park Road in the Kings Norton section of Birmingham, England.
Fortunately, she had a weekend to recover. Feeling better on Saturday, she went for a brief walk. But after visiting a neighbor on Sunday, the headache returned. By midweek, she developed a rash, prompting a doctor’s visit. He prescribed an antibiotic, but the rash persisted.
Parker mostly ignored her aches and muscle pains as she and her husband, Joseph, tried to maintain their day-to-day activities: Robert in his duties as a Post Office engineer; Janet as a photographer in the anatomy department of Birmingham University’s medical school.
But when she developed spots over much of her body, she was sent to East Birmingham Hospital, where she was admitted at 3 p.m. on Aug. 24. Doctors suspected Variola major, a serious form of smallpox, which was thought to have been eradicated globally. Electron microscopy of vesicle fluid confirmed the diagnosis and Parker was immediately transferred to Catherine-de-Barnes Isolation Hospital in Birmingham.
The hospital was one of a handful of isolation facilities remaining in the United Kingdom. Built in 1907, the Catherine-de-Barnes campus once housed as many as 16 victims of diphtheria, typhoid fever and smallpox but, as risks from these diseases diminished, the need for “fever hospitals” also declined. Indeed, Catherine-de-Barnes had been mothballed, though caretakers Leslie and Dorothy Harris had spent the previous 11 years cleaning and preparing the hospital so it could be readied for patients on an hour notice.
That hour occurred at 10 p.m. on Aug. 24, as the ambulance carrying Janet Parker arrived on the 20-acre grounds. Anyone coming in contact with her had to wear protective clothing and had to be inoculated against small pox. That included her husband and parents, Frederick and Hilda, who were among 500 contacts who would eventually be placed under quarantine.
Within an hour, the British press were tipped off. By morning, a full-fledged panic ensued.
It wasn’t the first outbreak of the disease to strike Birmingham. In 1966, Tony McLennan was diagnosed with a milder form of the disease, leading to at least 12 cases in the area. All survived and many Birmingham residents were vaccinated against the disease at that time, including Janet Parker.
Investigators determined that Parker’s immunity had worn off over time. They also discovered a connection between McLennan and Parker: both had worked as medical photographers out of the same office at the University of Birmingham Medical School. Furthermore, their offices were located one floor above a smallpox research laboratory, one of just three in the UK at the time.
Lab director Henry Bedson was continuing his research on the form of smallpox known as whitepox as the World Health Organization pressed for global eradication of the disease. But Bedson’s lab, which was constructed in 1930, was scheduled for closure and his budget had been cut, forcing him to work without benefit of protective clothing, airlocks and special showers.
In addition, several of Bedson’s staff had received no special training and WHO inspectors labeled the lab as substandard. An inquiry later found that Bedson had misled inspectors about the volume of work at the lab. He told inspectors that the work had steadily declined since 1973 when, in fact, he picked up the pace in order to accomplish as much as possible before the lab’s closing.
Although the inquiry found no certain cause for Parker’s contraction of the disease, the most likely culprit was the ductwork that ran from the lab to a small room in Parker’s office where she spent the greater part of one late July day on the phone, ordering photographic supplies.
As Parker lay in isolation, panicky residents demanded inoculations against the disease. Health officials, decked from head to toe in other-worldly protective gear, fumigated her car and home. Amazingly, no one else who worked in Bedson’s lab (or the entire four-story building) came down with the disease. Parker’s mother was diagnosed with smallpox, but was treated and recovered. Overall, though, the incident claimed three lives.
Parker’s father, Frederick. escaped smallpox but died of a heart attack while visiting his daughter. He was 71.
Bedson and his family were quarantined, but were hardly alone. For days after Parker’s hospitalization, he was besieged by camera crews and reporters. Though he felt he had done nothing wrong, friends say Bedson was riddled by guilt. On Sept. 1, as his wife was on the phone, he walked to the family garden shed and slit his throat. Five days later, he died at age 48.
Parker was the final victim of the epidemic, dying on Sept. 11, 1978. Her body was cremated to prevent spread of the disease and the crematorium was closed and thoroughly cleaned after the procedure. The funeral home handling her body canceled all other funerals and the hearse carrying her remains was escorted by unmarked police cars to minimize the possibility of an accident. The hospital ward where Parker spent her final days was sealed for five years. In October 1979. authorities fumigated the East Wing of the Birmingham Medical School.
Microbiologist R.A. Shooter led the investigation into Parker’s death, but his report was delayed until the Health and Safety Executive completed its prosecution of the university for breach of Health and Safety legislation. The university was found not guilty and the 236-page Shooter report was debated in the House of Commons in 1980. The report concluded that the lab was the source of Parker’s illness, but the mode of transmission was unclear.
The WHO declared smallpox eradicated on Dec. 9, 1979, and started to make plans to destroy all remaining stocks of the virus. But much of the scientific community objected and two sites were ultimately designated for the last 571 samples of the disease - one in Russia and one at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga. In 2014, vials from the 1950s containing the virus were found at a National Institutes of Health lab in Bethesda, Md., and were shipped to Atlanta.
The Parker case played prominently in the plot of Patricia Cornwell’s best-selling 1997 novel, Unnatural Exposure and was briefly mentioned in an episode of the House TV series, A Pox On Our House.
As it turned out, the 1978 smallpox incident could have been far worse. Parker was scheduled to attend a week-long course at Nottingham University around the time of her exposure, but canceled when her rash appeared. Had she gone, she would have come in contact with as many as 3,000 other attendees.
In 1981 Joseph Parker was awarded 26,500 pounds as a settlement of a death claim. In the mid-1980s, owners considered burning down the hospital where Parker received her smallpox treatment, but the building was instead sold to developers who by 1987 had converted it into luxury apartments known as Catherines Close.
Janet Parker, photographer
Born: March 1938
Died: Sept. 11, 1978
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.