Janet Parker - Death

Death

At the time of her death, Parker lived in Burford Park Road, Kings Norton, Birmingham, UK, and was employed at the University of Birmingham Medical School. She often worked in a darkroom above a laboratory where research on live smallpox viruses was being conducted. The viruses probably spread through a service duct that connected the two floors. On August 11, 1978, Parker (who had been vaccinated against smallpox in 1966) fell ill; she had a headache and pains in her muscles. She developed spots that were thought to be a benign rash. Ms Parker was admitted to East Birmingham (now Heartlands) Hospital on August 24 and diagnosed (by Professor Alasdair Geddes and Dr. Thomas Henry Flewett) as being infected with Variola major, the most lethal strain of smallpox. The next day, smallpox virus was confirmed by electron microscopy on fluid from her rash. Janet Parker was transferred to Catherine-de-Barnes, (then an isolation hospital) where she died of smallpox on September 11, 1978. Many people had close contact with Parker before she was admitted, but only her mother contracted the disease. Parker's mother, Hilda Witcomb (née Linscott) survived, but her father, Frederick Witcomb, died aged 77 following a cardiac arrest when visiting Parker in the hospital. The other close contacts, which included two Biomedical Scientists, from the Birmingham Regional Virus Laboratory based at East Birmingham Hospital, were released from quarantine in Catherine-de-Barnes on October 10, 1978.

On September 6, 1978, Professor Henry Bedson, the son of Sir Samuel Phillips and the head of the medical microbiology department, committed suicide. He cut his throat in the garden shed at his home and died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham a few days later. His suicide note read "I am sorry to have misplaced the trust which so many of my friends and colleagues have placed in me and my work." In 1977, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had told Henry Bedson that his application for his laboratory to become a Smallpox Collaborating Centre had been rejected. This was partly because of safety concerns; the WHO wanted as few laboratories as possible handling the virus.

Over a year later, in October, 1979, the university authorities fumigated the Medical School East Wing.

A similar outbreak occurred in 1966, when Tony McLennan, who was also a medical photographer and worked in the same laboratory later used by Janet Parker, contracted smallpox. He had a milder form of the disease, which was not diagnosed for eight weeks. He was not quarantined and there were at least twelve further cases in the West Midlands.