Professor Alasdair Geddes, infectious disease expert who diagnosed the last case of smallpox – obituary

Professor Alasdair Geddes,  who has died aged 89, was an expert in infectious diseases who diagnosed smallpox in the last recorded person to die of the disease anywhere in the world; later, following the September 11 attacks, he became an adviser on bioterrorism for the Department of Health.

In August 1978, after successful vaccination campaigns and after what was widely thought to have been the last ever case of smallpox, in 1977 in Somalia, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was gearing up to announce the worldwide eradication of the lethal virus.

On August 11 1978, however, Janet Parker, a 40-year-old photographer at the University of Birmingham medical school, went home from work with a splitting headache. By August 16 she had developed a rash on her chest, limbs and face. Her GP made a tentative diagnosis of chickenpox, though she had had the illness as a child. 

At 3 pm on August 20 she was admitted to East Birmingham Hospital. She had a temperature of 38C, complained of aching limbs, and had pustules all over her body. Physicians who examined her initially were perplexed. As the last known case of smallpox had been announced the previous year, the disease was the last thing on their minds. Geddes was called in for an opinion. 

Arriving at her bedside at 8pm, he immediately suspected smallpox. He was aware that Janet Parker’s darkroom was above a laboratory at the medical school that, under its director Professor Henry Bedson, an internationally recognised expert on smallpox, was one of only a handful commissioned by the WHO to research the virus. Bedson and his team had been conducting research on variants known as “whitepox viruses”, which were thought to be a threat to the WHO’s eradication programme. 

Geddes immediately rang Bedson, saying: “I have a suspected smallpox here, Henry, and it’s a lady who works as a photographer in the medical school.” Geddes took fluid samples from her blisters and drove to the medical school, where he met Bedson. 

At about 10pm Bedson put the samples into an electron microscope. “I said ‘can you see anything Henry?’,” Geddes recalled, “and he never answered. So I gently moved his head aside so I could look down the microscope and there were brick-shaped particles that are characteristics of the smallpox virus. [Bedson] was horrified, because there was little doubt that in some way the smallpox virus had escaped from his laboratory and had infected Mrs Parker.”

The response of health and local authorities in Birmingham, backed up by a team of experts from the WHO, was remarkable. By the time Geddes’s diagnosis was confirmed, Janet Parker was on her way to an isolation hospital near Solihull. By 11 pm all her close contacts, including her parents, had been placed in quarantine.