Minerva

Salmonella enteritidis is now the most common serotype of salmonella responsible for food poisoning, despite warnings about the dangers to health of raw and undercooked eggs. In the United States nearly a quarter of a million people developed gastroenteritis after eating ice cream made by a national manufacturer that had used tankers that were also used to transport non-pasteurised liquid eggs (New England Journal of Medicine 1996;334:1281-6). The contamination was low level but nevertheless sufficient to lead to clinical illness.

Research on nematode worms has identified four genes that seem to play a crucial part in determining the pace of metabolic and other activities. A report in “Science” (1996;272:949-50) says that when the genes are mutated the worms feed and swim more slowly and their lifespan is increased by a factor of five. The genes are believed to control a basic biological clock that “puts into synchrony everything that has a temporal component.”

Controversy persists about whether or not the quality of men's semen has declined in the past 50 years. One factor that may deserve more attention is the effect of alcohol. Research in Finland based on necropsies (Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 1996; 20:332-7) has found that the proportion of men whose …