With multiple vaccines in late stage clinical trials, we might have a vaccine for HIV within my lifetime. And with that brings the promise that there might eventually come the last case of HIV.
Only one disease in history has been wiped from existence. And someone, unfortunately, had suffer the last of it.
Today’s Moment of Science… the death of Janet Parker.
The last naturally occurring case of smallpox had been reported in Somalia in autumn of 1977. Weary epidemiologists hoped we might be done with this monster that hadn’t shown its face for the better part of a year. It had been banished from most continents for decades, being chased down to its last few holdouts methodically, in nothing short of a heroic effort. The WHO deployed about 135,000 workers from 170 countries, performing well over a billion house calls to rout out the last traces of it.
It had been relegated to the labs. For study, for safe keeping, for “just in case.”
There’s a legitimate argument for a need to keep some on hand, and in more than one place. For instance, if a dictatorial fuckhead cooks up a stockpile of mutant smallpox to give you a severe case of the Mondays? You maybe want a vial of it in a lab somewhere else on the planet under another fuckhead’s control to make a new vaccine. Howthefuckever, when dealing with a bastard virus that’s killed half a billion people in the last century of its existence, some precautions are in order.
It’s unclear exactly what happened the day that Janet Parker got sick in 1978. A medical photographer at Birmingham Medical School, she was working in the room above the lab where scientists were handling smallpox.
There were warning signs they shouldn’t have been handling it.
In 1966, a smallpox outbreak occurred in the area that wasn’t technically pinned on the medical school. But the index patient was, quite the coincidence, a medical photographer at the same facility. They were studying a few smallpox variants, and the WHO was like “hey could you um, fucking not?” It seemed like a possible threat to the success of the smallpox eradication program. Eradication of this disease was an arduous but feasible task specifically because the disease had no animal hosts, and once it was gone from humans, it could be gone forever.
But you know, people drop petri dishes. Not a comforting thought when dealing with a disease boasting a 30% fatality rate.
On August 11th, Janet Parker began feeling ill with tell-tale welts forming. Since she’d been vaccinated for smallpox and there was simply nobody on the fucking planet who could have coughed smallpox on her, doctors diagnosed her with chickenpox.
But she’d also had chickenpox.
Nine days later, severely ill, Parker was diagnosed with smallpox and admitted to the hospital. A vaccination campaign was undertaken, inoculating everyone who had been in contact with her. Somehow this got past her vaccination from 1966. It’s unclear why it was able to infect her, whether these variants were able to evade the vaccine’s protections or if her immune system shrugged off its responsibilities, which is rare but far from unheard of. Whatever the case, a boost of protection was ordered for everyone.
Extensive contact tracing, about five hundred vaccinations, over two hundred people in quarantine, and there was just one variola major problem left: Janet Parker. The last few weeks of her life were spent in a confusing, isolated, excruciating haze. Her vision deteriorated. She developed pneumonia. Healthcare workers who treated her were covered head to toe in protective gear, unable to offer any comfort as she lay dying.
Janet Parker became the last person in history to die of smallpox on September 11th, 1978.
The doctor in charge of the lab, Henry Bedson, took his life the same day. He left a note that 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 the ensuing investigation, they pinned down the exact strain of smallpox Parker was infected with conclusively to the lab. However, the popular theory that she got sick via the air vents is long disproven. To this day, it remains a mystery exactly how she came in contact with the virus.
With smallpox now eradicated, it exists in two known places on earth: the CDC in Atlanta, GA, and the VEKTOR Institute in Koltsovo, Russia. A debate exists as to if it should even exist there, but we’ll talk about that next time.
This has been today’s Moment of Science, just letting you know that they found live smallpox in a government facility in Bethesda, MD, in 2014.
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