Avian Flu, Viruses, Bed Bugs and Murder

Anna - In one sentence, why is conservation important?

Graham - We need clean water, we need clean air, we need seas that are well managed for fisheries, and we need to look after wildlife in all its forms, be it birds, or mammals or whatever.

Anna - In the UK and other developed countries, a lot of conservation seems to be setting up parks and setting up reserves that keep people out. In the developing world, people need access to these resources for their livelihood. Do you think we can have conservation in these areas as well as letting people exploit resources for their own economic benefit?

Graham - Yes, I don't think this is either / or. I don't think we need to use every square inch of any country for direct economic exploitation. If we did, then that would damage the economies of those countries. Developing countries need rainforests. They need them for soil protection and to prevent floods. If they look after them, there is the possibility to take timber out of them in what we call a sustainable way so that there's more timber to take out next year. And a lot of these places can be very attractive to tourists and generate money for the local economy in that way.

Anna - Because there isn't a lot of money in the places we want to conserve, it seems that the richer countries are going to have to pay for it.

Graham - Well first of all we have to convince our governments that it's in their economic interest as well to look after the world's environment, not just in the interest of whichever country we're operating in. The ecosystem works at a global level. If we just take the climate change issue, destroying rainforest on the other side of the earth is going to have a big economic and environmental impact back here, for example, in the UK. So we've got to convince politicians that it makes sense to pay more to look after the environment right around the world. I think part of the problem is that conservationists themselves haven't communicated the brilliance and beauty of what is being lost as well as its economic value. So I think that governments have got to pay more. I suspect that if we asked the average person they would contribute as well.

Anna - What type of thing can people do right here in the UK?

Graham - They can join a good conservation organisation like the RSPB - sorry for the cheap plug! But they probably do need to help conservation organisations to save the countryside. This isn't so we can keep people out. If you take some of the reserves in East Anglia like Minsmere on the Suffolk coast or Titchwell on the Norfolk coast, each of them has over 100 000 visitors each year. They're fabulous places to go for a day out. This isn't keeping people out. This is just managing beautiful parts of the coast so that they can support wildlife and lovely landscapes as well as give people enjoyment.

Chris - Now tell us a bit about the Chelsea Flower Show, your more light - hearted reason for coming.

Tim - I've been involved with the Chelsea Flower Show for three years, and it's been in connection with the Royal College of Pathologists because we've been trying to tell people what pathologists do. Chris here is a pathologist too! What we want to do is try and tell the public more about science. Last year we did a presentation on allergy, and we had a large stand about what allergies are and how you can diagnose them. On the lines of the Chelsea Flower Show, we also did a section on which flowers are bad for you if you have respiratory allergy, from pollen in particular, and those you can choose that don't have pollen. This year we're doing plants that give rise to drugs that treat diseases.

Chris - Nature's medicine chest is absolutely huge isn't it? Of the top ten drugs that are prescribed on a daily basis, 30 - 40% are derived from plants. Aspirin is a good example, although it has been modified from salicyn, which comes from willow trees. People are now even turning to the seas to see if there are interesting compounds harboured by corals, sponges and sea squirts. When will you be strutting your stuff at Chelsea?

Tim - It's the last week in May, so come along!

Chris - Your actual job isn't being at the Chelsea Flower Show. You are actually a virologist, and tackle people with various infections. Why do colds come back year on year, and why don't we become immune to them?

Tim - One of the problems is that there are so many viruses and other organisms that can cause colds. For example, if you're talking about entroviruses, there are 80 of them. Throughout your life, you may catch one one year and you've got another 79 to go at! When you have young children, you pick up lots of viruses. When they change schools, you pick up a lot more viruses. And equally there are some infections, like mycoplasmas for example, where you only have immunity for six years, so you can have several bouts of the same infection throughout your life. So kids are like virus factories! The other difficulty about children is that they often cough out more viruses than adults. SO often, for example with influenza, you find that influenza epidemics are driven by children in the family, and it is these families that are often drivers of the epidemic.

Chris - Why is it that these viruses come in runs at certain times of year? Why do they have a season, like 'flu always seems to come in winter?

Tim - I'm not sure I know the answer to that Chris, I'm not sure if you do. What's even more interesting is that if you take viruses like parainfluenza viruses, there are three major types, and two of them come in the winter, one of them comes in the summer. It has monotonous regularity. I'm not sure why though.

Chris - The only thing that jumps to mind, although it doesn't fit your rule for the summer is that in winter time everyone shoves themselves indoors, close the windows and congregate in a single warm room. This would probably increase the chance of spreading disease around.

Tim - We've also seen a huge epidemic of mumps recently, especially in students. That's because, especially in males between the ages of 16 and 20, they weren't given boosters of vaccine that many girls were in the catch up campaign. We do have a problem in this country of immunity rates for measles, mumps and rubella, and it's my view that the MMR vaccine is safe and there's a lot of unfortunate information that has been given out. I think that we will be having more outbreaks of these infections if the immunity level falls below a certain percentage.

Chris - We mentioned a study in Japan when Simon Baron-Cohen was here last week to talk about autism, which was one of the things that triggered people to stop having the MMR. 30 000 people were followed up who didn't have the MMR, and the rates of autism in those 30 000 people was higher than those who did have the MMR. So it's interesting to see that the people who don't have the vaccine have a higher rate of autism. It just looks like we're better at finding it.

Tim - I think so, and I also think that there's been a lot of confusing information. I don't blame people for thinking there may be a problem with MMR because of all the publicity it's been given. But there really has been no good evidence associated with this, and I speak as someone with a vested interest. My twin sister died of measles, so I have every reason to try my best to make sure that people are immune to it. It's a very serious disease. I think people have forgotten how severe these diseases are because they are not causing a lot of problems now. I think it's easy to forget that they are still there with the potential to cause problems.

Kat - What are the kind of effects that you can get from measles, mumps and rubella?

Tim - Mumps is the old English word for moping, 'to be mumpy'. It makes you miserable, as does measles. The thing that everyone highlights on is sterility in males, but also in females. It affects the reproductive glands and makes you generally unwell. With measles, the biggest problem is encephalitis, which will kill one person in a thousand. This is a swelling of the brain. If measles gets into the brain, it swells and gets particularly badly affected. You are either left with someone with severe brain damage or it can kill you. People have forgotten this.

Kat - What about rubella? That can affect pregnant women, can't it?

Tim - Rubella is entirely different because rubella is actually quite a mild disease. Rubella vaccine is, I believe, the only vaccine we give to people not to protect the individual but to protect their unborn child. Rubella causes problems in the unborn child such as brain damage, blindness and deafness. It's for that reason that people are vaccinated.

Chris - Tell us about avian flu, as we've had a number of emails from people in the past who are asking what's going on in the Far East, and are we brewing up another pandemic? Indeed, what is a pandemic and what is avian flu as compared with normal flu?

Tim - Over the centuries we know that there have been periodic waves of influenza. Most of the severe outbreaks of influenza which occur every 10, 20 or 30 years are because a new virus has emerged, usually from the Far East. What happens is that the flu virus that is going around in chickens and birds will recombine with a virus in humans. Once that virus that's living among chickens spreads to humans, and more importantly on from humans to other humans, then you have the potential for an outbreak. What we do have is a very sophisticated system throughout the world where people are looking out for these viruses, whether they have changed and whether there is any human to human transmission. Once that happens, all the red buttons are pressed. People are working very hard to produce diagnostic tests and vaccines and so on.

Chris - Elements of Murder is the title of your new book. How did you pick on that? It's a bit macabre isn't it?!

John - It is, and it's all about the dark side of the periodic table. I'm a chemist and of course there are elements in the periodic table like arsenic, lead and mercury which are very toxic, and so the book is basically about them. I spice the stories up by including lots of true crime situations. We're now in a position where we can look back 100 years to the Victorian times and the golden ages of poisoning and understand what they were doing. At the time, of course, it was a bit obscure. In fact you couldn't always detect the poison that was being used. For some poisons that was true up to fairly recently.

Chris - Rat poison was popular wasn't it.

John - Yes, that was a phosphorus compound. I remember as a child something called Phosphine that you put down and the rats came and ate it. They would then die.

Chris - In your other book 'The Shocking History of Phosphorus' you said that the best way to tell if someone had phosphor poisoning was to cut them open at the post-mortem and switch off the light.

John - Yes, because elemental phosphorus does in fact glow in the dark, that was the way of doing it. It wasn't a particularly good poison because you could disguise it. It has a particularly strong taste of garlic. The most famous poisoning was a woman in Blackpool. She actually mixed it with rum and murdered her landlady, who was very fond of rum. You could also disguise it by putting it into HP sauce! However, you can't get phosphorus now: it's almost impossible to get it for research as it's too dangerous to transport. There are poisons that are more subtle. Saddam Hussein's favourite poison was thalium. Thalium was the poison of Graham Young, who murdered his work mates about 20 or 30 years ago. Thalium is a good poison because the symptoms are delayed. The most characteristic symptom if you manage to survive is that all your hair falls out. However, if you're given a large enough dose, you die about a week afterwards before any of your hair falls out. We know that some of Saddam's agents came to Britain and poisoned people with thalium. That was in the 1980s, but nowadays it is really difficult to poison people because forensic science is so sophisticated that if poisoning is suspected, then chemists in forensic laboratories will be able to tell what it is. With thalium it is even possible to detect it in cremated remains, and Young's victims were found to be poisoned by that method.

Kat - Was Napoleon killed by the arsenic in his wallpaper?

John - The answer to that is no. He may have been affected by it but I don't think we can claim that he was poisoned to death by it.

Chris - You said that bed bugs weren't as much as a problem in Victorian times because of wallpaper.

John - Once Victorians took to wallpaper, and they were very fond of green flowery wallpaper, which used copper arsenite, that gave off arsine which was a gas that actually killed people. Bed bugs were quickly mopped up by it.

Yes, it is. Part of the reason is that when you yawn, you squeeze your eyes tightly shut. The way that tears flow is that they come out of your lacrimal gland, which is on the upper outer side of the top of your eye; they then flow - in a film - across your eye obliquely downwards and inwards. The tiny black dot on your lower eyelid is called a punctum, and that's where your tear duct starts and where the tears drain away. But if you squeeze your eyelids tightly shut, you close off the punctum, stopping the tears flowing across your eye and into the tear duct, so they build up in the eye. This makes you cry a little bit, which is why tears appear when you yawn.

The life cycle of the louse is very distinct and discreet in that the eggs take seven days to hatch, and that's almost invariable. Up until that time, you're not going to get rid of all the little ones that are going to hatch out. But it takes them nearly ten days to become adults, and so therefore they can't lay any eggs until they've reached that point. In between those two points, you have a stage where the lice won't move into anybody else. While they're half-grown, they stay put. It's only when they get to about 6 or seven days old that they start getting interested in moving house. From then on, they'll start shifting onto somebody else. Your lady wouldn't have been infectious if she only had baby ones on her.

When I was young this was a very common practice, however, chicken pox can actually be a very dangerous disease, in pregnant women in particular. If they haven't had chicken pox and get it early in pregnancy, it can cause problems in the baby, so they need to see a GP very quickly. Equally if adults get chicken pox, again, there's a much higher rate of complications with swelling of the brain and pneumonia. Every year in Cambridge we have one or two people who die from chicken pox. It's more serious than people think. So it's not really that great to get it, even if you're young because you can always pass it onto someone else, who might be pregnant or older. The next thing coming along is a chicken pox vaccine, which may well be in use in a few years time.