Between school and university I worked for a year as a lab technician in Dulwich Hospital in south London. After some months, I had developed sufficient expertise to be asked to make extra blood tests on a patient whose illness had proved impossible to diagnose. At that time, the mid-1960s, analyses were done in test tubes and flasks, on dilutions of serum handled without gloves and sampled using mouth pipettes! I completed the tests, passed on the results and thought nothing more about it. A week later a senior consultant came to lab and informed us that the patient had finally been diagnosed. Worryingly, it was with typhoid fever, an infection caused by Salmonella typhi.(1) Everyone one in the lab was placed under surveillance for three weeks. I felt uniquely vulnerable having undertaken the extra tests and worried myself sick; literally so on occasions and this further added to my anxiety. Typhoid fever was greatly feared at the time, as the most serious form of food poisoning, though one expected to catch it from eating contaminated Argentinian corned beef, as in the Aberdeen outbreak in 1964, not at work. My first two tests were negative. However, at five o'clock in the morning on the day my final result was due, I was awoken by a blue light strobing round my bedroom ceiling. I went to the window and there was an ambulance outside our house with its rear doors open. I waited for the knock on the door, expecting to be taken to isolation. But was soon reprieved when ambulance men emerged from the house opposite with a neighbour who, in turned out, had gone into premature labour. Later that day I learned that my final test result was also negative. For while I was more careful with pipetting and washing my hands, but soon returned, like everyone in the labs, to handle blood and other body fluids in casual ways that would be in breach of every current health and safety standard. Anne Hardy, in her fine study of food poisoning in Britain from 1880 to 1875, demonstrates that infections due to the Salmonella bacillus were typically viewed as ambivalently as they were at Dulwich Hospital in the winter of 1966. On the one hand, outbreaks were the subject of concerted scientific investigation and public health concern, which raised popular fears, particularly during episodes with high mortality. Yet on the other hand, such anxieties did not persist and alter behaviour in the longer term, leading to constant complaints by public health authorities about the nation's poor domestic hygiene and British government complacency in the face of dangers from new ways of producing, distributing and consuming food. Indeed, in her conclusion, Hardy argues that the situation did not alter until the quarter century after her study ends, when serious food poisoning outbreaks, as at Stanley Royd Hospital in Wakefield in 1984 and then with the