Rachel Clarke

Friday

Rachel Clarke

Tim Shipman, Colin Freeman, Rachel Clarke, Michael Gove & Melanie Ferbreach

40 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Tim Shipman interviews shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick (plus – Tim explains the significance of Jenrick’s arguments in a special introduction); Colin Freeman wonders why the defenders of Ukraine have been abandoned; Rachel Clarke reviews Liam Shaw and explains the urgency needed to find new antibiotics; Michael Gove reviews Tom McTague and ponders the path that led to the UK voting to leave the EU; and, Melanie Ferbreach provides her notes on made-up language. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Rachel Clarke

Will we resist the bacteria of the future?

Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time she’d presented to A&E, a recent graze to her leg was causing such disproportionate pain that her family had been forced to carry her. When the surgeons opened up the limb, they found carnage. Group A streptococcus – a bacterium that benignly colonises the throats and skin of millions of us – had burrowed from the graze into the deepest tissues, where it dissolved flesh with the ease of battery acid.