[Magdalen] Cleaning and Disinfecting Churches

[Louise Laughton]

As I understand it, a bacterium is a living thing on its own whereas a virus takes over our (or whatever its host’s) cellular mechanism to reproduce itself. Sometimes a virus moves in and stays dormant for a long time. A virus can give us one disease, think chickenpox, from which we recover and then years later flare up as something else — think shingles. Viruses are weird. TB was such a fearsome horror, and then it ended — mostly. We read from time to time about new and dreadful versions of the old “white plague,” usually occurring in closed environments such as prisons. It’s been a while since one of those outbreaks hit the news.