Kat's Best Bits

Chris - Hello, Bob.

Bob - Hello, there.

Chris - Welcome to the Naked Scientists. Tell us what happened with this case. Tell us about this history.

Bob - Well this is a travel agent, a 36-year-old lady who worked in Lusaka. Unfortunately shortly after she got ill - you know the beginning of diseases is always milder than what comes later - she went from Lusaka down to a wedding in South Africa and then went back because there was some confusion as to about whether she actually picked up the infection in South Africa or Lusaka.

Chris - What were the symptoms she was complaining of?

Bob - Initially, I mean with any of these things if you're talking about Ebola or severe diseases, people start off with non-specific pain. The same way flu starts with headache and muscle pain and just not feeling well and fever and rigour. That was how she started. She was taking pills for headache and that sort of thing. She went down to the wedding in South Africa and she returned on Sunday evening. From the Monday she was feeling extremely ill and couldn't go back to work at all. She saw several doctors in town and by the Friday she was medically evacuated to South Africa and the following day she died.

Chris - What was the cause of death?

Bob - At that stage what normally happens is that people who are extremely ill, whether it be Ebola or anything else, the infection's really similar to anything with bacterial infection or so-called septicaemia. It could be meningococcal septicaemia so a very similar picture. Clinically the clinicians do the right thing. They pump them full of antibiotics to save their life but the trouble is then if you do a blood culture to diagnose the illness you're not going to find the answer because there's always antibiotics. People die of one illness like that in every city every day. They have this septicaemia and so there was nothing that was deemed to be unusual about it. She was deemed to be a bacterial septicaemia and she died and no results were obtained.

Chris - So how did you find out it was something unusual?

Bob - It was only some days later, two weeks later, when a paramedic who'd flown down in the air ambulance with her came down with the same symptoms and was also medically evacuated. People put two and two together and realised there was something unusual and that's often the case. Talking about emerging diseases earlier in this programme, quite often people can have an emerging disease and a one-off like that you don't notice. It's only with accumulated evidence. When the second person came down and that person developed the same symptoms and it happened to be at the same hospital a day later. The physician recognised this looked identical to the first one.

Chris - Can you tell us what the actual organism was that they were suffering from and where it came from?

Bob - Well this whole group of organisms are known to be associated with rodents. They cause chronic infection in rats and mice of various species. Each of these viruses tends to be associated with a particular rat or rodent species.

Chris - How do you think the lady got it from the rat?

Bob - That's a big question yet to be answered. One of the things is there was a lot of confusion initially. Did she become sick in Zambia or South Africa? We believe it was Zambia and one of the things that has been suggested is an increase in wheat farming. It's not that is just more has been planted per acreage because the price has gone up. That's the sort of thing that happens in nature with human intervention, that we create a bonus situation for rats and mice. With all this wheat around them, grain crops, there's a population explosion. Maybe that had something to do with it because she lived on the edge of town and indeed worked on the edge of town.

Chris - Can you tell us briefly what can you do about this in the future and what's the likelihood of it recurring?

Bob - Well, I suspect it will recur and suggest that we will be better geared-up next time to recognise it. I think even in Zambia the physicians are really good at knowing what to look for.

Kat - Now over the recent decades ponds have vanished from our natural environment but the charity Pond Conservation is embarking on an ambitious project to see thousands of new ponds being created in the U.K. Have you noticed the quality of ponds changing over recent years?

I went along to the launch of their Million Ponds Project to find out more and one special guest at the event was gardener and broadcaster Alan Titchmarsh.  He is so lovely.  So I started off by asking him why ponds are such an important part of our landscape.

Alan -  The greatest thing about ponds is that for something so relatively small the wildlife they support is absolutely huge.  If you think of the things within the landscape that use a pond, from birds coming down to drink, hedgehogs and mammals coming down to drink.  The pond life that's in the depths there and in the shallows from pond skaters and water boatmen to newts, frogs, toads, damsel flies, dragon flies, you start to build up this list and you think all that just for a little patch of clean water, and that's the vital thing and the answer is yes, and anybody can make one.

It is so simple - you can do it in an afternoon.  Make a small pond, take charge of it; make it clean.  You think 'Well, hang on a minute, how am I going to introduce all that wildlife to it?'  You don't have to; it will come.  The most astonishing thing is that all that wildlife finds you of it's own accord.

Kat - How would someone go about digging a pond?  What would be your top tips for them?

Alan -  Oh it's not just the quality of ponds it's the amount of ponds.  We are losing numbers of ponds that are disappearing.  I am lucky enough to live in a village which has a village pond, which is fed by natural stream.  So it is wonderful.  It stays clean.  But they are disappearing.  They get filled in and they get polluted, that's one of the most difficult things, we have run off from farmland and nitrates. 

Our clean ponds are now very few in number.  I think it's about 80% of our ponds are no longer clean but it is not difficult to pull that right.  I think that's the great appeal of Million Ponds is the fact that we can address this quite easily, relatively quickly and also quite economically.

Kat -   How much fun can you have with ponds?

Alan -   People tend to make ponds either too small and they heat up like saucepans on a hot summer's day or too deep, strangely enough.  They think a pond is going to be about four feet... 18 inches in the middle is ample, go to two feet if you want, make sure it's got shallows so things can get in and get out and there's more life in the shallows of pond than there are in the depths.

If you have a 3-foot deep pond there's nothing much living right down the bottom there at all, one or two amphibians might hibernate there but most of them hibernate outside the pond, I mean under stones and things like that. 

So it's so easy with a decent liner that can't get perforated and a bit of under lay, a bit of soil on top of it and then you can either fill it or you can be very patient, and wait for a rainy day.  It's so easy, it's easy as that.

Kat -  So ponds are easy to make and they are more fun than watching TV.  To find out more about the Million Ponds Project I spoke to Jeremy Biggs, Policy & Research Director at Pond Conservation.

Alan -   My big thing about ponds is exactly that and that to me is the essence of conservation.  There tends to be a lot of finger wagging in conservation terms and the onus is on you and it's a weighty responsibility.  It is the greatest joy in life to do something which improves that nasty thing called the environment.  I am certain my life's work is to find a better word for environment.  I like landscape, that's much nicer.

It is so joyous you introduce children to gardening too, and that's the sort of sharp end, if you like, of conservation, just dabbling around in the soil with a trowel making a pond, looking at pond life.  They are entranced by it and that's far more and I say this as someone who knows, far more to watch in a pond than there's on telly.

Kat - So ponds are easy to make and they are more fun than watching TV.  To find out more about the Million Ponds Project I spoke to Jeremy Biggs, Policy & Research Director at Pond Conservation.

Jeremy -   Million Ponds Project is a five-year initiative to add about 4,000 new ponds to the countryside and in the longer term to double the number of ponds in the British landscape to get back to the million ponds or so that we had at the beginning of the 20^th century.

So over the next 50 years we are going to make 500,000 new ponds to replace those old ones that we have lost.

Kat -   It sounds ambitious.  Who is going to help you do this?

Jeremy -   Well there are all sorts of people making ponds.  It is actually not as ambitious as it sounds, I would say.  When you look around the countryside it's about 20 ponds a day being made by people already.  So that's five or 6,000 a year.  So actually all we need to do really is just to capitalise on that work that they are already doing out there and make it a bit better and make them help people to get the best of the pond creation, of work they are already doing very often.

The people would be doing it, really again that's all kinds of people, from big organisations like the R.S.P.B., the National Trust, the Environment Agency, right through to the individual land owners and land managers.  People can even make ponds at home in their garden as well.

Kat -   And what are the risks of not bringing by the ponds?  How we see the environment change as a result of losing so many ponds?

Jeremy -   There are so many things that live in ponds, about two-thirds of all types of fresh water plants and animals there are can be found in ponds.  So if you lose those ponds and in particular if when so many of them damaged by pollution and other impacts, so it's about 80% which are in poor condition. When so many are damaged and degraded, that means there's just less habitat available for a whole range of fresh water plants and animals, many of which have now become rare, most of the things which need clean water are struggling now-a-days.  There's just nowhere left for them to go.

So by putting back that clean water we hope to take the pressure off a bit, let things spread out again, just to give them the refuge.

Kat -   And finally tell me about your favourite pond?

Jeremy -   Well I have got lots of favourite ponds, actually to be honest, almost any pond which is clean and unpolluted, has a rich stands of plants under the water.  When you take a pond that you dip it, you see lots of different kinds of animals in the water.  There are lots of amphibians around.  These are not so common these days. 

So almost anywhere where you see something like that, that's one of my favourite places.  Of course you can see these dotted around the countryside still from the south of England, from the Lizard Peninsula, in the far south west, right through to the far North West highlands of Scotland.  You can find them dotted around.  To be honest, those are really all my favourites.

When I was a child, I used spend a couple of weeks each summer high in the Italian Alps in an idyllic little village called Cogne that nestles quietly between high ice-clad peaks. To most Italians, the name is associated with a sensational murder. Others, know that in winter the valley has some of the finest ice-climbing in the Alps. But to me, Cogne will always be connected with the element iodine.

One afternoon, when I was around 10 years old, returning with my Dad from a long hike, we passed a dull gray building on the edge of the village. It was surrounded by a tall metal fence and had an institutional look about it. Sitting on the bench all on his own was a strange-looking old man - he had rather shaggy hair, a vacant look, and a large, distended pouch of skin where his neck should have been.  I was utterly shocked by this strange being. I pestered my father with questions. Who was he? What was wrong with him? Why did he look so sad?

My father, whose patience in the face of a barrage of questions was almost infinite, explained that the poor man had grown up with insufficient iodine in his diet. Iodine, he went on, was essential for the proper development of the thyroid gland in the neck, and that if one didn't eat the right kind of salt, especially as a child, one might develop goitre and one's mental development would also be affected. I would later read of English travellers passing through the Alps referring to The Valleys of the Cretins - travel books of the period would include lurid illustrations of the poor unfortunates. The numbers were staggering; the Napoleonic census of the canton of Valais in 1800 found 4000 cretins in a population of 70,000 - well over 50% of the population would have had goiter.

The disease had been known to medical writers for centuries. Galen for example recommended treatment with marine sponges. In 1170 Roger of Salerno recommended seaweed. Similar suggestions were also made in China.

Paracelsus, the great renaissance healer, alchemist, and writer was one of the first to spot the connexion between goiter and cretinism, and first suggested that minerals in drinking water might play a role in causing the condition. But what these mysterious minerals might be was a mystery.

In 1811 a young French chemist, Bernard Courtois, working in Paris stumbled across a new element. His family's firm produced saltpetre, needed to make gunpowder for Napoleon's wars. They used wood ash in their process and wartime shortages of wood forced them instead to burn seaweed,  plentiful on the coastlines of northern France. Adding concentrated sulphuric acid to the ash, Courtois, obtained an unexpected purple vapour that crystallized onto the sides of the container. Astonished by this discovery he bottled up the crystals and sent them to one of the foremost chemists of his day Joseph Gay-Lussac who confirmed that this was a new element and named it iode - iodine - after the Greek word for purple. Courtois continued to play with the element and was rather shocked to discover that when mixed with ammonia it produced a chocolate-coloured solid - the ammoniate of nitrogen tri-iodide - that exploded violently at the least provocation. His contemporary, Pierre Dulong, was less fortunate, losing an eye and part of a hand while studying the material, the first in a long list of casualties from this notorious explosive.

The toxic qualities of iodine were also soon realized, and the tincture, a yellowish-brown solution of iodine in alcohol began to be widely used as a disinfectant. Even today, the most common water purification tablets one can buy in travel shops, are based on iodine.

It was only two years after its discovery, that a doctor in Geneva, Francois Coindet, began to wonder whether it wasn't the iodine in the seaweed that was the missing mineral responsible for goiter.  He therefore began administering tincture of iodine to his patients by mouth - an unpleasant business - but, he reported, it led to the disappearance of swellings in 6 to 10 weeks. His colleagues, however, accused him of poisoning his patients, and at one point he was said to be unable to go into the streets for fear of being attacked.

While elemental iodine undoubtedly was toxic, Coindet was on the right track. During the 19^th century, by a process of one step forward two steps back, the hypothesis gradually gained credence, as experiments using the more palatable salt, potassium iodide, showed that goitres could be reversed. By the early 1920's, Swiss cantons began to introduce iodized salt and over the following decades many countries that had been plagued by goitre followed suit. The policy has been so effective that many of us in the developed world are unaware of how serious a disease this had been, and the word cretin has lost much of its meaning.

When I returned to Cogne last summer, I tried to remember where the institute had been. All I could find was a summer holiday camp, with children playing happily behind the gates where I had seen the old man. I phoned my Dad to ask him, and we chatted about the old days - the bad old days of the cretins - and of ghosts banished by that unique purple element, iodine. 

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