Hugh Pennington

Covid-19 has made A&E departments very quiet. I worked in the one at St Thomas’s Hospital when it was called Casualty. Undressing a homeless patient once caused the centrifugal escape from his clothes of a shimmering sheen of lice, hundreds of them. Sister Cas was called. She rolled up her sleeves and said: ‘This reminds me of Dunkirk!’ Most lousy people have only a handful. The best quantitative study of lousiness was done by Alexander Peacock, an RAMC entomologist, in the trenches on the Western Front in the First World War. He found that 95 per cent of the soldiers were infested, more than 60 per cent with 20 lice or fewer, but 2.8 per cent – he called them ‘horrible examples’ – had more than 350 on their trousers and shirts. This pattern of distribution, in which most of a human population’s parasites are concentrated in only a few individuals, is very common. Statisticians call it ‘overdispersion’.

More than sixty years ago, puffing on an untipped Senior Service (we were allowed to smoke in those days) to cover up the reek in a dissecting room at St Thomas’s Hospital, I was struck down by a pandemic virus that had recently evolved in China. By the time I fell ill (its onset was very sudden) the virus had already killed more than 20,000 people in the UK, with 1150 dying every week at its peak, and 80,000 in the US. In the first UK wave, more than half the deaths occurred in the under-55s. It went for the elderly later, in its second wave. It killed quickly: nearly 20 per cent of its younger victims died before getting to hospital and two-thirds were dead within 48 hours of admission. But it has been airbrushed out of history, despite being by far the most lethal pandemic to affect Britain at any time in the hundred years after the ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic at the end of the First World War.

The emergence of a new coronavirus in Wuhan at the end of 2019 has not been a virological surprise. New coronaviruses causing respiratory infections have been detected from time to time since SARS (which was a surprise) in 2002-3; MERS came in 2012. How ‘new’ these viruses are is debatable.

In 2004 I described the basis of attacks on the MMR vaccine as ‘unsubstantiated speculation masquerading as science’, and finished the piece: ‘I despair.’ Measles is now busier in Europe than it was fifteen years ago.

‘Chlorinated chicken’ is pejorative. Chlorine gas doesn’t come into it. The meat isn’t bleached. Poultry carcasses are washed with dissolved antimicrobials such as sodium chlorite, chlorine dioxide and trisodium phosphate. The EU banned it in 1997, not because the washes leave the meat dangerous to eat but because it might incentivise poultry producers and processors to give hygiene a lower priority. This argument was used in the 1930s by opponents of milk pasteurisation.