Liam Shaw is a Wellcome-funded research fellow at the MacLean Lab in Oxford, researching bacterial genetics. He is writing a book about the history of antibiotics.
On 12 November, a man travelled to the UK on a small boat across the Channel. On arrival in England, he was taken to Manston processing centre in Kent. On the night of 18 November, he became unwell and was taken to hospital. He died the following morning. The Home Office said there was ‘no evidence’ that he had died of an infectious disease. A week later, a follow-up PCR test came back positive for diphtheria.
On an atoll in the Indian Ocean, on an April day in 1836 when the water was unusually smooth, Charles Darwin wandered out over a coral reef. He gazed through the water into the ‘gullies and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought
One doctor who has worked in Manston told the Today programme of inadequate washing facilities in the ‘horrible and crowded conditions’. The chief inspector of borders and immigration said last week that the conditions he had seen on a visit had left him ‘speechless’. According to the Refugee Council, one boy contracted scabies – caused by parasitic mites – after a nineteen-day stay. A video taken by the campaign group SOAS Detainee Support on Sunday, 30 October showed children chanting: ‘We need your help.’
The UK health secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has announced her intention to make it easier for people in England to get antibiotics. The plans are still vague, but involve patients being able to get some antibiotics directly from pharmacists without a GP prescription. Pharmacists in Scotland have for several years now been able to prescribe antibiotics for uncomplicated urinary tract infections (UTIs). Based on this data, the Department of Health and Social Care believe that such a move in England could save 400,000 GP appointments a year.
In Hogarth’s An Election Entertainment, depicting the 1754 Oxfordshire by-election, a placard lies on the floor: ‘Give us our Eleven Days’. The slogan refers to the adoption of the Calendar (New Style) Act, which caused eleven days in September 1752 to be removed from the calendar. The idea that there were actual riots over the erasure bobs up like a historical beachball no matter how often it is punctured. It’s all too easy to imagine people taking to the streets in outrage at the bureaucratic theft of time. UK universities were invited to begin their submissions to REF2021 in February 2020.
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