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Date with a deadly disease

In 1962, an outbreak of Smallpox hit south Wales, in the United Kingdom, killing 19 people and causing the government to vaccinate more than 900,000. The outbreak was mysterious because, at the time, the disease was widely thought to have been eradicated in Europe. What’s more the outbreak was full of mysterious events.

Fifty years after the outbreak, lecturer James Stewart has unveiled a web site that collects memories from the time, called Smallpox1962. To compile it, he appealed to people to send in photos or information, and also collected entries from the national archives.

The mysteries, though, are still there. It’s known that the smallpox outbreak began with a traveller arriving at Cardiff from Pakistan. On January 13, Shuka Mia arrived in the country, having caught a train from Birmingham after arriving in Britain on a plane from Pakistan. Smallpox had caused hundreds of deaths in Pakistan during that winter, and though Mia held a vaccination certificate, he was carrying the disease.

A day after he arrived in Cardiff, Mia was diagnosed with smallpox by Dr White, and he was taken to Landsdowne isolation hospital, where the diagnosis was confirmed by professor John Pathy. However, by this point, the disease had made its way through Cardiff, and over the weeks, panic had spread. Eventually, six people died in one area of Wales, and a further 13 died in another. Mia, however, survived.

The thing is, no one in Cardiff actually became ill. And weeks later, a consultant at a hospital in a village many kilometres away was diagnosed with the disease. He was the only doctor in the hospital who decided not to be vaccinated and he died. But no one knew how he got the disease. This has since been explained by the fact that he treated a woman in Rhondda, who died in childbirth. Her family had been affected by the outbreak, and he must have caught it from her, but no one knows how it came to her, so far away from Mia.

Meanwhile, many more kilometres away, the disease was about to be declared as eradicated, but days later, 12 ladies died in a hospital in Bridgend. No one knows how the disease made it over to the town.

“The official report suggests the virus may have been carried to her home on the air,” says Stewart. “But was there a missing connection between the Rhondda and Shuka Mia when he was in Cardiff? Prof John Pathy believed there was – a visitor to Shuka Mia when he was ill in a room above the Calcutta Restaurant.”

Later on, more was to come, with the virus travelling all the way to Glanrhyd mental hospital, where eight patients were diagnosed. Many of the patients came from Rhondda, but none had actually been there. In the first week, 12 of the patients died, and Pathy drove daily to the patients and staff and the now quarantined hospital. But it’s still unclear how the virus made it the hospital in the first place.

“The official report suggests it may have been carried on the air from Heddfan hospital, three quarters of a mile away, where some of the Rhondda cases had been isolated,” says Stewart.

The mystery may never be solved. But, hopefully, Wales will never see such an outbreak again, given that the last natural case of smallpox was seen in Somalia in 1977. By 1986, routine vaccination had stopped across the world. Either way, 50 years after the horrific outbreak, Wales still remembers its date with the deadly disease.

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