Hugh Pennington

The​ name is misleading. The commonest natural hosts of monkeypox are the small rodents that live in rainforests in West and Central Africa. But it can infect a very wide range of animal species, including humans. Unlike bat coronaviruses it doesn’t have to mutate to move from one species to another. When smallpox was common, monkeypox cases went unrecognised, because the two diseases...

‘The​ recent cluster of cases of microcephaly and other neurological disorders reported in Brazil, following a similar cluster in French Polynesia in 2014, constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.’ The statement by Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, on 1 February was very precise. It wasn’t about the spread of Zika...

Bedbugs never went away. DDT gave them a hard time in the 1940s and for years afterwards, until Rachel Carson’s campaigns outlawed it, but resistant strains survived. Other insecticides – synthetic organophosphates and pyrethroids – have come and gone, but none has been a challenge for the bugs’ versatile genomes. Blood is their only food. The bug explores the skin of its victim with its antennae. It grips the skin with its legs for leverage, raises its beak, and plunges it into the tissues. It probes vigorously, tiny teeth at the tip of the beak tearing the tissues to forge a path until it finds a suitable blood vessel. A full meal takes 10 to 15 minutes. A hungry bug is squat and flat like a lentil. When replete, its distension shapes it like a long berry. A bug will feed weekly from any host that is handy.

As a student at St Thomas’s Hospital, I used to walk the long ‘Nightingale’ wards – Florence Nightingale had not only founded its school of nursing but was influential in the design of the building – and learned to avoid prayer-time because the way out was obstructed by the line of ‘Nightingales’ kneeling at the door in order of seniority. And...

Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar (let’s use the place names used by the World Food Programme) on 2 and 3 May, blasting the Ayeyarwady delta and the capital, Yangon. The population of the declared disaster areas – much of it the country’s granary – is about 13 million. About 1.5 million have been seriously affected. In many places houses, farming assets and food stores have been destroyed and the land ruined by saltwater.