• Question: what things have you been the first to dicover

    Asked by 787epdj29 to Beccy, Kevin, Liz on 12 Jun 2017. This question was also asked by the_famous_bee, Els_07, Team Stony.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 12 Jun 2017:


      For example, I was the first person to calculate how many cattle had been infected in the UK epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease). It was nearly 1 million cattle and most of them had already been consumed as food before they showed signs of the infection. When I did this calculation in 1996, it wasn’t clear how many people might die as a result. So far in the UK 178 people have died but the numbers have dropped to be very low (one death in 2016, no deaths in 2015) so although each of the deaths was a tragedy, it could have been much worse for us as a population and the risks weren’t known until after most of the exposure of the human population were already done.

    • Photo: Liz Buckingham-Jeffery

      Liz Buckingham-Jeffery answered on 22 Jun 2017:


      I haven’t been doing this job for very long so I haven’t discovered anything a good as Christl has yet! But the bit of work I’m most proud of is developing a new (quite simple) method that Public Health England now use to improve their analysis of data from GP surgeries.

Comments