08 Jun 2020
Setting it Straight: Slime, rhyme and snot in the time of COVID-19
Setting it Straight - Issue #10
Written by Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty
Kids’ nursery rhymes can reflect all sorts of things, from the depths of history, to the obsession of small children with various body excretions and secretions. In the ‘acceptable in polite society category’, an easy one to relate to infection and immunity is:
Ring a ring o’ roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A’ tishoo, A’tishoo,
We all fall down.
The grimmest (and not necessarily most favoured) interpretation of this rhyme is that it refers to the sneezing and coughing of pneumonic plague (caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis) accompanied by the skin reddening, or rose-colour of fever. Unlike the plague, which we treat now with antibiotics, children are at low risk of dying of COVID-19: a recent French study showing mortality rates of 0.001% for the under-20s compared with 0.7% across the population.