the court case against the university for breach of safety legislation, its official publication was postponed until the outcome of the trial was known, and it was not published until 1980. Once it was published it had a significant impact. Shooter's report was debated by Parliament. Nicolas Hawkes wrote, in 1979, that: Prosecution On 1 December 1978 the Health and Safety Executive announced their intention to prosecute the university for breach of safety legislation. The case was heard in October 1979 at Birmingham Magistrates' Court. Although the source of infection was traced, the mode and cause of transmission was not. Evidence presented by several internationally recognised experts, including Kevin McCarthy, Allan Watt Downie and Keith R. Dumbell, showed that airborne transmission from the laboratory to the telephone room where Parker was supposedly infected was highly improbable. The experts calculated that it would require of virus fluid to have been aspirated (meaning, in this context, removed by suction of fluid and cells through a needle) and it would take 20,000 years for one particle to travel to the telephone room at the rate the fluid was aspirated. It was additionally found that although the Shooter Inquiry noted the poor state of the duct sealing in the laboratory, this was caused after the outbreak by engineers fumigating the laboratory and ducts. The university was found not guilty of causing Parker's death. Other litigation In August 1981, following a formal claim for damages made by the trade union Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs in 1979, Parker's husband, Joseph, was awarded £25,000 in compensation. Conclusions and impact Although it seems clear that the source of Parker's infection was the smallpox virus grown at the University of Birmingham Medical School laboratory, it remains unknown how Parker came to be infected. Shooter's criticisms of the laboratory's procedures triggered radical changes in how dangerous pathogens were studied in the UK, but the inquiry's conclusions on the transmission of the virus have not been generally accepted. Professor Mark Pallen, who wrote a book about the case, says that the air duct theory "was not really believed by anyone in the know". Brian Escott-Cox QC, who successfully defended the university in the subsequent prosecution, said in 2018: In light of this incident, all known stocks of smallpox were destroyed or transferred to one of two WHO reference laboratories which had BSL-4 facilities: the Centers for Disease Control