That moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30 percent of those who contracted it from the face of the earth. Around 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.
But in 1978, the disease cropped back up in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. Janet Parker was a photographer at Birmingham Medical School. When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chicken pox. After all, everyone knew that smallpox had been chased out of the world.
Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital, where testing determined that she had smallpox after all. She died of it a few weeks later.
It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort.
Some papers reported that the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.)
Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic.
