Hugh Pennington

Hugh Pennington’s Covid-19: The Post-Genomic Pandemic is due in the autumn.

The English Disease: Who’s to blame for BSE?

Hugh Pennington, 14 December 2000

The remarkable thing about the Phillips Inquiry into BSE is not its cost, £27 million, or its 16 volumes, weighing in at 25 kg, or its overrun – it went on for more than double the year originally planned – but its thoroughness. Digesting the massive final report will be more than enough for most. But there is a lot more: witness statements and transcripts of oral evidence...

Letter

Feedback

14 December 2000

The particular culpability of the processors and vendors of the cattle feed that spread BSE through the British herd and probably sent it elsewhere is raised trenchantly by Elizabeth Young (Letters, 4 January). Although the Phillips Report does not give complete absolution, stating that ‘we … censure (although we do not have the means to identify) those in the feed industry who deliberately breached...

I attended my first post-mortem in the summer holidays between leaving school and matriculating as a medical student. I have been to hundreds since, and am very familiar with the smell of a hospital morgue: meaty, like an old-fashioned butcher’s shop, with the added low-key, sickly-sweet pungency of unopened intestines and peritoneum so characteristic of an abdominal operation in life....

Woolsorters’ Disease: the history of anthrax

Hugh Pennington, 29 November 2001

The big puzzle about anthrax is that terrorists have so far used it so little. After all, the bulk of the world’s population lives in countries where it occurs naturally, and where it isn’t difficult to get live material to start a culture. The notion that you need to be trained in biological warfare to grow it is ludicrous. In principle, any doctor, dentist, vet, microbiology...

Diary: Smallpox Scares

Hugh Pennington, 5 September 2002

Laboratory stocks of smallpox are just as malevolent as their natural counterparts. The last human smallpox infections anywhere in the world were contracted from such stocks and occurred not in Africa, Asia or South America, but in England.

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