Hugh Pennington

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...

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....

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...

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.

“When will we have remedies for Sars? (Because it is caused by a virus we can be certain that it will not fall to penicillin.) Is the virus evolving? How malignant is it? Is it possible that too much fuss is being made about it and that our response to Sars points to a defining feature of modernity – that we are afraid?”