Hugh Pennington

The UK has the highest incidence in the world of poisonings caused by the toxins produced by E.coli O157:H7. It killed 17 people in the outbreak centred on Wishaw in central Scotland in 1996, still a world record for lethality. My involvement in attempts to stop a repeat led to an invitation to visit the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down. Security was impressive. The heavily armed welcome at the gate left an abiding memory. It is reasonable to guess that the Russian chemical warfare facility at Shikhany is as well guarded. The notion that nasty substances of high purity could leave it without some kind of authorisation seems highly unlikely.

Oxfam is in serious difficulties. It is reasonable to speculate that the hard time it is being given by the international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, is due to the workings of Miles’s law - 'Where you stand depends on where you sit' – in that it reflects forces in the British government and the Tory party hostile to the foreign aid programme. I sit as a microbiologist, and see the harmful events in Haiti following the arrival of foreigners after the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake very differently, both from a quantitative and from a political point of view.

Some reviewers of the film Goodbye Christopher Robin are saying that A.A. Milne had post-traumatic stress disorder. Yes, he was at the front during the Battle of the Somme; in August 1916 he was a signals officer there, and worked in no man’s land. But PTSD didn’t send him home. He was brought down by trench fever (bartonellosis). A bacterial infection spread by body lice (not those of the head or pubes), it causes a high fever, which repeats itself a few times every five days. It doesn’t kill, but sometimes leaves its victims feeling weak for many months. This happened to Milne. After being invalided home, he lost weight and developed fatigue, said to be caused by ‘overwork’, but much more likely due to the persistent effects of Bartonella quintana. In the early autumn of 1917 he spent three weeks at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, then a convalescent hospital for officers.

I lived for several years on the 10th floor of a tower block in Cumbernauld. It swayed a bit in the wind, but had been strengthened after the Ronan Point disaster. Ronan Point in Canning Town was built from large prefabricated concrete panels. Ivy Hodge was one of its first tenants, moving into a corner flat on the 18th floor on 15 April 1968. At 5.45 a.m. on 16 May, she struck a match to light her gas cooker. A friend had fitted the cooker. He tested for leaks using a lighted match, but had used a substandard nut, and there was a leak. The explosion blew out the external load-bearing walls of her living room and bedroom. The corner walls of the flats above collapsed and fell. Their weight took out all the corners of the flats below. Four people were crushed to death.

The ‘much loved’ status of red squirrels in Britain probably won’t be damaged by the discovery that some of them are lepers. The finding that individuals on Brownsea Island are infected with a leprosy bacterium with a DNA sequence close to that of one circulating in medieval England seems unlikely to provoke significant concerns for public health, either. We don’t hunt, skin, eat or cuddle red squirrels so the opportunities for transmission are remote.