Hugh Pennington

Lambing is just starting. But the pictures on TV in the last few days have been of stillborns, and of newborns with bent legs, seized-up joints and crooked necks. Their mothers had been infected during pregnancy with the Schmallenberg virus, called after the German town where it was discovered last year. It belongs to a family – the bunyaviruses – that are mostly spread by insect bites.

The big question for virologists in recent years is why H5N1 influenza hasn’t mutated to cause a pandemic. It is as feeble today at spreading from person to person as it was in 1997, when it first drew attention to itself through a dramatic chicken-to-human outbreak in Hong Kong. H5N1 human infections are very nasty with a high mortality, But they are very hard to catch. To start growing, the virus has to get deep into the lungs. The surest way for this to happen is to be a South East Asian cockfighter. They stimulate the birds by spitting down their throats; the birds spit back.

Cell suicide by a programmed process – apoptosis – is necessary for human health. It starts long before birth, sculpting us as embryos. It is essential for the proper functioning of our immune systems and of organs that continually produce new cells, like the intestines and bone marrow. When it goes wrong, it can lead to strokes, heart attacks and cancer. Its subversion by microbes plays a crucial role in Aids and many lethal infections. Todd Rider and his colleagues at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory may have found a way to use the enzymes that make it happen – caspases – as antiviral agents.

Don’t think that because your salad sprouts are organic, grown on your window sill, and supposedly good for you, that they haven’t accumulated many food miles or are safe to eat raw. Compelling evidence published by the European Food Safety Authority yesterday points to fenugreek sprouts as the vector of the E. coli that caused the enormous German outbreak in May and June (more than 3000 cases, with 47 deaths) and a French outbreak at Bègles, near Bordeaux, in June. The only common factors in the outbreaks were genetically identical E. coli O104:H4 – and fenugreek from the same Egyptian source.

'It's the sprouts,' the head of the Federal Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Reinhard Burger, announced on 10 June. No surprise. Bean-sprout food-poisoning outbreaks occur regularly. The first big one was caused by Salmonella in the UK in 1988, when 143 people fell ill after eating contaminated mung bean sprouts. The outbreak in Sakai City in Japan in 1996 was caused by radish sprouts contaminated with E.coli O157. In the UK last year 231 people were infected with Salmonella from bean sprouts.