Secrets of sewage science
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Maybe listen to this one BEFORE you eat… James is off to meet the sewage scientists trying to stop the next pandemic. He meets the teams that were monitoring 80% of people’s faeces during Covid-19 and finds out how sewage led to hundreds of thousands of children having an emergency polio vaccine. James needs to collect a sample at a water treatment works and then head to the laboratory… just be glad you can’t smell a podcast.
Presenter: James Gallagher Producer: Erika Wright
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, |
| 0:05.4 | The Traitors Uncloaked. But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's |
| 0:10.6 | Saturday bonus episodes, the Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Ryland, and comedy specials |
| 0:16.2 | from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffel and Rommas Shranger Nathan. However, and maybe I'm biased, it's really all about the traitors uncloked. |
| 0:24.3 | So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, listen only on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.5 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:42.7 | Hello everyone, and I'm sorry for starting in such a disgusting way with flushing the toilet we are, I'm afraid to say, going to be following what happens to that sample very |
| 0:48.1 | quickly. |
| 1:01.0 | This is going to be a program about poo because I've become quite fascinated by it. |
| 1:03.7 | I know that sounds like a really dirty and horrible confession to make. |
| 1:06.9 | But you can learn so much from it. |
| 1:11.6 | So not only do you learn about the gut bacteria that are in there that tell you so much about your health, but it's proving to be an invaluable tool in medicine overall as well. So hundreds |
| 1:17.7 | of thousands of children are being vaccinated against polio in London now because polio virus was |
| 1:23.0 | detected in sewage water. And analysing sewage water also proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| 1:30.3 | So there's so much to learn, and yet I don't know so much about it. |
| 1:33.3 | So what else am I going to do? I'm going to find a friendly scientist who's going to take me around his own pet sewage works. |
| 1:40.3 | Hi, Francis. Nice to meet you. Hi, James. How are you? I'm good. Well, I've arranged to meet people in very weird places, but the Gens Toilets is probably the weirdest. And you very kindly invited me over because there aren't many people who get to say, well, I've got my own sewage works. That's right. So, yeah, I'm Francis Hassard, senior lecturer in in Public Health Microbiology at Cranfield University, |
| 2:01.9 | part of Cranfield Water Sciences, and we're lucky enough to have our own sewage works here on campus. |
| 2:05.9 | You're going to give you a tour? |
| 2:07.0 | Yeah, I will, absolutely. |
| 2:08.6 | I'm assuming this is not appropriate clobber for the sewage works, right? |
| 2:12.9 | Yeah, we're going to need to get you some PPM, I'm afraid, James, yeah. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.