Hugh Pennington

The Vale of Leven Hospital Public Inquiry report was published on 24 November. At least 34 patients had been killed by Clostridium difficile in 2007 and 2008 in the hospital in Alexandria, a small town at the foot of Loch Lomond. The report tells one horror story after another about bad nursing, ignorance about infection and management incompetence. The failings beggar belief.

The current Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia is the biggest ever in terms of fatalities, geographical distribution and duration. A person sick with it flew from Liberia to Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, from which many travellers arrive in the UK every day. So it was no surprise to hear that COBRA has met. Announcing that it has met is in itself crisis management: ‘We are aware of the problem and something is being done.’

Sooner or later the Brazilian football team will be treated like lepers, or perceive themselves to be so. Unfair to lepers, but appropriate for an off-pitch reason. The official World Cup mascot, Fuleco, is a Brazilian three-banded armadillo. Humans apart, the armadillo is the only animal that gets leprosy. Admittedly, the evidence refers to the nine-banded kind; it is not known whether the three-banded armadillo is susceptible. It would be very hard to find out, because the Brazilian species is very rare and in danger of extinction. Fuleco's name is a portmanteau of ‘Futebol’ and ‘Ecologia’.

Bacillus cereus has infected premature babies in London, Brighton, Peterborough, Cambridge, Luton and, possibly, Southend and Basildon. One has died. Contaminated intravenous nutritional food was the route of transmission. Bacillus cereus is everywhere. Its natural home is soil, water and vegetation, and it is found in most raw foods, particularly cereals. It produces tough spores, which are heat resistant (they survive boiling), and toxins.

A cluster of nine cases of tuberculosis in cats in Newbury at the end of 2012 and early 2013 spread to their human owners, causing serious lung disease in two of them and infection without disease in another two. Unsurprisingly, when the results of the investigation were published, it became a top news story. It would have been an even bigger one if it hadn’t had to compete with Ebola in Guinea. TB in domestic cats is not new.