enteritidis, so the investigators could not pinpoint the source of the outbreak with 100 per cent certainty. However, the dangers posed by this bacterium in eggs and egg products have become clear over the past decade (though Edwina Currie exaggerated the risk in 1988). Together with other evidence, this makes the origin of the Welsh incident virtually certain.Given that the bacterium can occur in eggs, the ways of preventing it from causing illness are to reduce its chances of growing (by refrigeration) and to kill it (by thorough cooking) On this occasion, S. Though they could not test the foods, the investigators screened samples of faeces from all the campers for disease-causing bacteria.A comparison of these results with the food items eaten by individual campers quickly highlighted lemon meringue pie as the most likely – indeed the only – source of infection. Every one of the 42 individuals who had eaten the pie had become ill And every one of them had S. enteritidis in their faeces, except one who had eaten only three or four spoonfuls.
None of the faecal samples contained any other hazardous microbes.The pie had been made from eggs, pastry, sugar and lemon powder. The condition of 33 of them soon deteriorated, and ambulances ferried the victims to hospital. Thirty-one of them had to be intravenously rehydrated.
The bacteriologists who investigated the incident found the campers had discarded the remains of the meal consumed the evening before the first symptoms appeared. Three days after they arrived, 46 of the 49 members of the party went down with gastroenteritis. The victims in the Wales case – the first reported outbreak caused by a new type of S.
enteritidis discovered in 1993 – were on a trip organised by a Boys and Girls Brigade group. The 12 adults and 37 children (aged nine to 17) brought tents, ovens, cooked and uncooked food from their home town 300 miles away But they had no refrigeration facilities. Polonium decays much faster than tritium, so stockpiling it for decades is impossible.Tritium controls will never on their own make nuclear disarmament watertight. However, these controls are worth investigating as supplements to the more usual ways of enforcing disarmament.
Tritium can be an instrument for peace as well as a tool of war.The writer holds a personal chair in sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of `Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change’ (MIT Press).. With summer around the corner, a warning to campers. Life under canvas can provide the perfect conditions for bacteria to proliferate in foodstuffs, according to a new report of a gastroenteritis outbreak caused by Salmonella enteritidis during a camping holiday in north Wales. Thirty-three people were admitted to hospital with diarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Describing the incident in Epidemiology and Infection, Ruairi Brugha of the Central Public Health Laboratory in Colindale, with colleagues in Cardiff and Bangor, points out that infected eggs pose a particular danger to campers. However, such weapons are larger and harder to deliver to their targets They also have vulnerabilities.
Most nuclear weapons programmes have begun with designs that use radioactive polonium to produce a sudden reaction. So a violator might feel compelled to hide away not just weapons, but also a stockpile of tritium. Because that stockpile would decay, the violator would also need to try to hide (or covertly construct) a facility for separating out the decay products, purifying the tritium, and sealing it into pressure vessels ready for use.Less advanced nuclear states probably possess simple, unboosted weapons that do not use tritium. Tritium decay would weaken boosting, reducing the weapon’s destructive power. The unboosted yield of a modern American warhead is just 500 tons – less than a fortieth of the explosive power of the Nagasaki bomb. Tritium has civil uses in medical isotopes but the world’s largest supplier, Amersham International, uses at most 0.05 grams of tritium a year. This is about one hundredth of the only published figure for military applications: 4g per warhead.Any realistic agreement to abolish nuclear weapons is likely to be phased in over 20 or 30 years.
