Hugh Pennington

Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart, there have been very few deaths from acute radiation poisoning. Thirty-one firemen, engineers and others at Chernobyl; two physicists who fumbled when handling a sphere of plutonium at Los Alamos, one in 1946 and one in 1947; and a few others, including some contaminated by contact with illegally dumped radiation sources, are the only people to have been lethally...

The term ‘allergy’ was coined in 1906 by the Viennese paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet to denote any kind of biological reactivity, including asthma, hay fever, reactions to insect bites and stings, and the immunological effects of vaccines and natural infections. Some influential contemporary specialists thought the new term to be both wrong and unnecessary. Wrong, because the...

M stands for methicillin, a chemical derivative of penicillin, first called BRL 1241 because it was developed during the 1950s in the Beecham Research Laboratories at Betchworth in Surrey. R stands for resistant; the development of methicillin resistance in a hospital was first detected in October 1960 in Guildford, also in Surrey. And SA stands for Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium that causes boils, carbuncles, abscesses, osteomyelitis and most wound infections after surgery. It was discovered in the late 1870s by Alexander Ogston, a surgeon at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

I worked on bird flu in a laboratory in London in the 1960s. We called it KP, short for klassische Geflügelpest. The boss was an ardent Germanophile, but this wasn’t the only reason. He wanted us to remember Werner Schäfer’s discovery in 1955 in Tübingen that KP, fowl plague, was an influenza virus, and Shäfer’s suggestion that such bird viruses might...

Well over three hundred years have gone by since the plague died out as an indigenous disease in Britain. It lingers on only as a rare rural infection in Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Zaire, Botswana, Uganda, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, the US, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Burma. Worldwide, the annual number of human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of...