​The patient was in his mid-twenties and was clearly terrified. He was escorted in to the Emergency Department by his mother who quickly explained to the triage Nurse what she thought was going on.
 
“He’s had a stroke his face is drooping and he can’t speak properly!” she cried.
 
The Nurse looked at the patient and it was clear that his face was drooping on the left hand side.
 
“When did this start?” the Nurse asked in a calm voice.
 
“I woke up like this this morning”. He said struggling but he understood the question and had a recognisable speech pattern, but he was dribbling. “It’s awful” he continued. The patient looked like he was going to run screaming from the department.

Last week saw an event of great celebration and much excitement and even made it onto the national TV news… No, I’m not talking about the marriage of Prince Harry and Megan Merkel... I’m talking about the birth of a little baby boy who turned up unexpectedly 3 months post-term!
 
Okay, so clearly 3 months post-term is not going to be a human baby. This baby weighed somewhere between 90-120 kg and took over 22 months to “cook” in his 35-year-old mum Thi-Hi-Way. Yep, he’s an elephant calf, and his keepers at Chester Zoo were caught completely by surprise when they came in to work on Friday morning to find a new-born elephant calf amongst their herd of Asian elephants. Wow what a job! They had thought his mum had miscarried as she had gone long past her due date, but low-and-behold they were wrong… I hope they call him Harry for obvious reasons!
http://www.chesterstandard.co.uk/news/16239014.Surprise_baby_elephant_birth_at_Chester_Zoo_astonishes_keepers/ 

In 1941 John Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson of Calico Printers' Association of Manchester, England, patented a new compound that changed the way foods are packaged, the clothes we wear and many other manufacturing processes. The compound was poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), and is the most widely used polyester plastic worldwide. About 60% of the world’s PET is used to produce polyester often in the context of clothing production, with about 30% being used to produce plastic drinks bottles.

Antibiotic resistance is a major threat to public health. This isn’t just my opinion but also that of Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer for England, as well as the World Health Organisation and other numerous national and international groups. It is not only the treatment of infections that will become impossible but perhaps an even greater threat is that surgery will no longer be possible without an unacceptable risk that the patient will die from a postoperative infection; who would want a surgeon to operate on their bowel without the availability of antibiotics to stop bowel bacteria causing peritonitis afterwards?

Between 2000 and 2003 a large outbreak of Clostridium difficile occurred in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. There are differing reports as to the extent of the outbreak, but some estimate that in 8 hospitals there were 7,000 cases and 600 deaths in 2003. This is at least a 5 fold higher incidence and mortality than considered “normal” by the Canadian public health officials. The strain of bacterium was identified as the now notorious O27 strain, but it was soon realised that this “outbreak” was in fact going on all over the World, not just in Quebec. Apparently Clostridium difficile means the “obstinate spindle” bacterium… and I think all Microbiologists would agree with the term, though some of us might be less polite in our language!