Hugh Pennington

Joanna Blythman does not like supermarkets. The bigger they are, the greater her hatred. She says they are responsible for the slow death of community life. They take the skill out of shopping. They subvert home cooking. They have done away with seasonal variety. Their buyers are bullied by their superiors to bully their suppliers. Supermarkets have an obsession with hygiene at the expense of...

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...

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...

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.

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...