Apocalypse soon?

When the Lord smote the Philistines with emerods in their secret parts he left it to historians to debate the nature of this lethal affliction. Literally translated, emerods are haemorrhoids, but it is surely unlikely that so hardy a race would have succumbed to an epidemic of piles. Scholarly opinion seems to concur that the emerods were buboes in the groin, one of the agonising manifestations of the plague. So the disease, it seems, has been with us for millenia, but since the last major outbreak in 1894, which carried off 12 million of its victims, has – or so it was thought until a few years ago – yielded to antibiotics. Now the Black Death, it seems, has returned, and most recently in antibiotic-resistant form. More, as a past leader of the Soviet biological weapons programme, Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov (now Ken Alibek and an American citizen) has disclosed, strains carrying plasmids for resistance to a range of antibiotics, and for good measure a gene expressing a neurotoxin, were developed in Russia and stockpiled in twenty-ton quantities. Yersinia pestis, Alibek averred, is easily 'weaponized', and pneumonic plague, the most virulent form, is conveniently disseminated on the breath of expiring victims. A more present threat is drug-resistant tuberculosis, which is beginning to ravage the undernourished underclasses in Russia and elsewhere, and has become a familiar spectre in the hospitals of the West. It is thought to kill annually some 28 million people around the world. The theme of Shnayerson and Plotkin's scrupulously researched and mesmerising book is the infinite capacity of bacteria to mutate and neutralise all missiles that science has thrown at them, and the human folly and rapacity that has allowed them full scope. The theme ... is the infinite capacity of bacteria to mutate and neutralise all missiles that science has thrown at them and the human folly and rapacity that has allowed them full scope. The miracle of penicillin did not endure long: even before it reached the market the emergence of resistant strains of Gram-positive pathogens had been observed, and there were already muted warnings of what was to come. These did not prevent the elixir from turning up in cough medicines, mouthwashes and soaps, and, Michael Shnayerson and Mark Plotkin tell us, it was even added to soft drinks as a 'general health powder'. Such practices, at least, ceased in the 1950s, but worse was …