Ever since Edwina Currie's salmonella, Britain has seemed cursed by major food safety scares, with E.coli and BSE particularly prominent. Amidst tabloid frenzy and recrimination, the public is dependent upon sober scientific risk assessment and rational evaluation of what went wrong. Hugh Pennington has been at the forefront of this as a scientist, expert witness and commentator, and this book is his accessible but rigorous account of these diseases and the events surrounding them. This is a disaster book for the general reader giving authoritative but non-technical accounts of BSE/variant CJD and E.coli O157 - what happened, what went wrong, the human interest, and the science - all in the context of disasters (like Piper Alpha, Aberfan, and rail crashes), history and politics.

Today, we are far less likely to die from infection than at any other time in history, but still we worry about epidemics, the menace of antibiotic resistance and modern 'plagues' like Ebola. In this timely new book, eminent bacteriologist Hugh Pennington explores why these fears remain and why they are unfounded. He reports on outright victories (such as smallpox), battles where the enemy is on its last stand (polio), surprise attacks from vegetarian bats (Ebola, SARS) and demented cows (BSE). Qualified optimism, he argues, is the message for the future but the battles will go on forever.