Hugh Pennington

The arrival of bluetongue in eastern England in the late summer of last year was not a surprise. There were large outbreaks of the virus among farm animals in Belgium and the Netherlands, close enough to Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex for these counties already to be designated at risk because it was known that the infection could be carried by wind over the sea for hundreds of kilometres. An...

Diarrhoea diminishes dignity. In the Western world most people don’t bother to seek medical advice for it, because they are embarrassed and because they expect it to go away soon. They are often right: most community-acquired intestinal infections are self-limiting and get better more quickly if left untreated. This is true even for E. coli O157. Taking antibiotics or antispasmodics is thought to increase the risk of developing the complications of kidney failure, brain damage and cardiac death. But Clostridium difficile is different. Treatment with special antibiotics often works well, but about 7 per cent still die. E. coli O157 outbreaks have much lower mortality rates and infections caused by it are much rarer. In England and Wales in 2005 there were 950 laboratory-confirmed cases; in that year Clostridium difficile caused 51,690 cases of disease and was mentioned on 3807 death certificates.

On 16 July, Cadbury was fined £1 million, having pleaded guilty to charges that they had put unsafe chocolate on sale, had failed to alert the authorities that salmonella was in the chocolate, had breached hygiene controls, and had committed six other food safety offences at their Marlbrook manufacturing plant in Herefordshire. Essentially, Cadbury came unstuck because of bad...

Carolus Linnaeus, who was born almost exactly three hundred years ago, on 23 May 1707, was the founder of modern systematics and taxonomy, the sciences of classifying and naming living things. Science has no holy books, but Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae comes close. Its tenth edition, published in Stockholm in 1758, was the starting point of zoological classification, and the binomial...

Big Science took off during the Second World War and justified itself with successful ventures such as the Manhattan Project. Physicists have operated on a grand scale ever since. Lavish public funding has enabled them to conduct enormous experiments, each taking years in the planning and requiring hundreds of scientists and machines that cost hundreds of millions. Biology is different. Its...