The flesh-eating bug

I was out for a walk the other day when I started thinking about all those phenomena that we used to hear about on an almost daily basis, but that have since been forgotten in the archives of history or been superceded by newer, trendier concepts. I think of acid rain, CFCs, lead poisoning, Michael Bolton. One rarely hears about these any more (in the latter case, that is undoubtedly a much welcome relief), although we now hear a lot more about climate change, melamine, mobile phone radiation and Ditta von Teese.

But what about the flesh-eating bug? There was a time when this was the scourge of hospitals, the flesh eating streptococcus causing that wonderfully exotically and scarily named condition, necrotizing fasciitis. It has, of course, more recently given way to equally nasty things, like MRSA and Clostridium difficile. But those of us who appreciate vintage do, on occasion, miss hearing about the flesh-eating bug, so it was with a certain amount of quiet glee that I glanced over at a fellow commuter this morning to peek casually at a headline from The Daily Mail (really, why.....?), which was all the more enjoyable for its quirky ambiguity:

"I Caught Flesh-Eating Bug Doing Gardening"

I rushed to the paper's website (this was a one-off, obviously, not something I do on a regular basis), although I was slightly disappointed to find that this was actually a story about an unfortunate gardener who brushed her hand across her eye and ended up on life support following a nasty eye infection. But even the staunchest of evolutionary biologists would have to admit that that would have been quite a sighting indeed.....