Hugh Pennington

“Retractions of scientific papers are not uncommon. They usually happen because a research team has been unable to replicate or substantiate its findings. But the formal retraction of an interpretation is almost without precedent. Horton’s leader [in the Lancet] on ‘The Lessons of MMR’ doesn’t discuss the scientific strength of the link made in the Wakefield paper between autism and MMR. It implies that with hindsight he would not have published it – but the reason would have been Wakefield’s apparent conflict of interest, not doubts about its truth.”

For something to return, it has first to go away. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, TB never did go away; in richer countries it was only driven down to lurk in the places inhabited by society’s rejects. It didn’t disappear completely from among society’s paid-up members: its germs sleep in me today. I have a Ghon focus in my left lung, a collection of cells, some from my...

Syphilis and the League of Nations have more in common than you might think. Both were dumped into the dustbin of history in the 1940s: syphilis by penicillin, the League of Nations by the Second World War. But the connection goes further than chronological coincidence. Before the war, the League took a deep and direct interest in syphilis, with its Health Organisation arranging conferences...

“When will we have remedies for Sars? (Because it is caused by a virus we can be certain that it will not fall to penicillin.) Is the virus evolving? How malignant is it? Is it possible that too much fuss is being made about it and that our response to Sars points to a defining feature of modernity – that we are afraid?”

Laboratory stocks of smallpox are just as malevolent as their natural counterparts. The last human smallpox infections anywhere in the world were contracted from such stocks and occurred not in Africa, Asia or South America, but in England.