Author: lauraspinney
-
God’s perfume
IN THE EARLY 1990s, the then Mayor of Versailles, André Damien, discovered a folded paper in the drawer of an antique desk he had just bought at auction. When he opened the paper up, he saw that it had written on it a formula for what seemed to be a perfume, so he took it…
-
Food, globalisation and pandemics
ONCE a dangerous new pathogen is out, as we are seeing, it can be difficult if not impossible to prevent it going global. One as contagious as SARS-CoV-2 has the potential to infect the whole of humanity. Eighty per cent of cases may be benign, but with such a large pool of susceptible hosts, the…
-
On pandemics and inequality
A LOT has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened…? This article first appeared in The Guardian on 12 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.
-
When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine?
WHEN will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Public-facing scientists such as the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and his US counterpart, Anthony Fauci, keep repeating that it won’t be before 12 to 18 months. But other voices – including some of those in the race to create a vaccine themselves – have suggested…
-
Scientists make ethical decisions too
SOMETIMES the parallels between this pandemic and previous ones are uncanny. Take hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that regulatory agencies all over the world are now hastily authorising for the treatment of hospitalised Covid-19 patients. Outside hospitals, Donald Trump and the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, have expressed enthusiasm for the drug, people are breaking social distancing…
-
Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?
WHERE did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading… This article first appeared…
-
The state transformed: Singapore
SINGAPORE is a small country and an island nation to boot. But it is also a major commercial, tourism and transport hub that receives more than three times its population in visitors each year. So it is remarkable that at the time of writing it has recorded just 558 cases of Covid-19 and two deaths,…
-
Outbreaks of all kinds: The Rules of Contagion review
DID you notice? There was a moment when something shifted, and all topics of conversation besides Covid-19 started to sound trivial. Things will surely shift again, as people realise that the self-confinement could last and escapism becomes our collective goal, but for now Adam Kucharski’s The Rules of Contagion is the book you might want…
-
It takes a world to create a pandemic
WHEN I get stressed, a patch of annoying red eczema appears on the inside of my upper right arm. The doctor gives me some cream to rub on it, but I also know that to stop it coming back I have to deal with the underlying problem… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 25 March…
-
Lockdown in migrant camps in Greece
AS the Schengen area closed its external borders last week, in a move designed to replace the closing of member states’ national borders against imported Covid-19 infection, some internal barriers still went up in Europe. The day after the European commission’s announcement, the Greek government introduced a set of measures that would apply to the…