Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My cast away this week is Professor Hugh Pennington. In his youth he was drawn to pathology. This was long before Quincy and CSI

lent the profession an air of somber glamour. Back then he was influenced by the

work of his uncle, an undertaker. He has spent his professional life trying to understand diseases and how they spread.

He's chaired two major inquiries into E. coli, and his influences felt everywhere from school

kitchens to hospital wards. These days his

calm expertise is sought on public health matters including MRSA, C. Deficil,

Salmonella, and now of course swine flu I suppose Professor Pennington what seems to be a matter of life

and death to most of us is just bread and butter to you yes I suppose I could say

that all these diseases are good for my business in a sense.

I wish they weren't but they are and new ones come on all the time which

keep my business flourishing as it were.

Probably more contagious than any infection is public fear itself. How much sympathy do you

have for all of us headless chickens who run around worrying if something's going to get the

better of us? Well, a lot lot of sympathy because a lot of the

fear is unjustified but on the other hand one does see tragedies as well so one

has to put it into a perspective into balance and that's often a good way of

making people wash their hands for example and then you

have to live your life anyway and you have to take risks. Do you wash your hands a lot?

No more than no more than the average person. Really? You don't? I don't think so. I think it's really when you wash your hands, that's the important thing rather than how often you watch them.

As you've said, when these anxieties grow among the public, your views are sought, you you know by not just by government advisors

...