Biologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States went down to the Pennsylvania lab of pharmaceutical giant Merck last month after employees reported the discovery of ampoules labeled “smallpox.”
The lab was immediately quarantined and the FBI opened an investigation, but to everyone’s relief, the situation turned out to be a false alarm.
Although the steps taken between the report of the discovery to the US Department of Homeland Security and the receipt of the results of the analysis of the samples may seem extreme, such announcements are treated with the utmost seriousness given the history of the virus.
Smallpox, a disease caused by two viruses of the same name, is extremely deadly, killing about 30 percent of those infected.
But thanks to a comprehensive global vaccination program against it, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1979.
The last smallpox death occurred in the UK
The last person known to have died of smallpox, a disease that killed 300 to 500 million people in the 20th century alone, died in the summer of 1978.
Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, was working at Birmingham Medical School where she used a telephone and soon began to feel unwell.
At first doctors diagnosed her with the flu and then with chickenpox after specific skin rashes began to appear.
Almost a month after her infection, on August 20, 1978, she was hospitalized on suspicion of smallpox.
On the floor below where Parker used the phone was a laboratory that contained samples of the virus, which was run by Professor Henry Bedson.
Bedson was a smallpox researcher who was studying whether smallpox variants would be a problem after eradication.
WHO inspectors visited his laboratory in May of that year and said they were unhappy with what they found.
But Bedson was allowed to continue his research on the condition that certain safety changes be made. It is possible that the inspectors were more lenient considering that the laboratory was to be closed anyway within 6 months.
This proved incredibly unfortunate for Parker, who used the phone above the lab about a month before the scheduled closing date.
A particularly virulent strain of smallpox, called Abid – after the 3-year-old boy in which it was discovered – had escaped through an air duct, reaching the floor where the photographer made a phone call.
The researcher from whose laboratory the virus escaped committed suicide
While Parker and his close relatives were in quarantine, the world press descended on Birmingham to see if the deadly disease could recur. Unfortunately, Parker died shortly after he was hospitalized.
Professor Henry Bedson also died, taking his own life before the confirmation of Parker’s death, terrified that he might have given birth to the disease he was trying to eradicate.
“I am sorry that I have deceived the trust that so many friends and colleagues have placed in me and my work,” he wrote in a farewell letter, believing that the virus had escaped from his laboratory, as confirmed by investigations. subsequent.
Only one other person, Parker’s mother, had contracted the virus, but she showed only mild symptoms and soon recovered.
Smallpox was declared eradicated a year after the incident, and it was decided that all remaining smallpox samples would be destroyed or moved to two secure laboratories – one by the CDC in the United States and one in Russia, which had remained since the Soviet Union.
Currently, these two laboratories should be the only ones in the world that have smallpox samples. But in 2014, several ampoules were discovered in a South African laboratory, carelessly sealed in a cardboard box.
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