A deadly return. I'm Rebecca Leib. I'm Jason Horton. And this is Ghost Town.

In the summer of 1978, panic struck the city of Birmingham overnight. Over 500 people were

sent into isolation and vaccinated over the following weeks. The World Health Organization and

the media swarmed the city and the population of the world held its breath. All because medical

photographer Janet Parker was in an isolation ward in Catherine de Barnes Hospital and her

condition was only getting worse by the day. She had first been diagnosed with the case of chicken

pox but when she didn't respond to doctors and medical examiners were forced to accept the

diagnosis far more serious. Janet Parker had smallpox. This was a troubling time for anyone to

catch smallpox let alone someone who live in a country where the disease hasn't been seen in

over five years because the World Health Organization were on the cusp of announcing smallpox

as being eradicated when Janet Parker was diagnosed with it. The diagnosis greatly contradicted the

claim that the threat of smallpox was behind us and it had the entire world on edge. Smallpox is

a two week incubation period which means that anyone Janet Parker had come in contact with

during those two weeks where she wasn't showing symptoms could also be carrying the disease and

have it passed on to others. The World Health Organization, the government and medical staff,

sprang into action, isolating anyone and everyone they could find that had come into contact with

Janet in any way and everyone waited with baited breath to see who else would come down with

the disease during the incubation period but thankfully no one else did. More on that after this

break. This was both a relief and part of Janet's diagnosis that was more than a little bit

troubling. How could Janet have caught the disease if no one else was sick? Janet Parker had recently

been working in Birmingham Medical School where she had taken pictures in a lab led by Professor

Henry Bedson. He had samples of the virus in his lab and was one of the professors on the front

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