Anna Walker
speaker
274 appearances
5 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 2 Jul
Anna Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The UK Health Security Agency here in London is one of them.
Dr Colin Brown, who's in charge of antimicrobial resistance, led me to one of the labs on site.
After a safety briefing, I was shown a kaleidoscopic array of circular plastic containers filled with agar jelly made from algae.
These are used to grow and identify bacteria from samples taken from hospital patients.
Oh, we've got a whole selection box of Petri dishes here in colours I have never seen before.
So I'm used to this colour, which is just plain and translucent, but you've got a light blue, a very vivid red, a kind of chocolate brown, and then maybe a wine-coloured one?
Redder than normal blood.
Oh, delightful.
So what would you expect to grow on the blood plates?
You're unscrewing the swab from its little container.
You're just touching the end of the cotton bud just very lightly on the surface.
So different species can not only talk to each other, but trade
war secrets with each other, trade weaponry ideas.
Are they the ones that people are now getting faecal transplants for?
So those good bacteria are better at taking up real estate than the bad bacteria, and so they out-compete it.
You're making it sound so nice and clinical, but you're taking poo from one person and giving it to another person.
Dr Colin Brown from the UK Health and Security Agency.
Bacteria can use this trading of secrets and weapons for better or worse inside our bodies.
So understanding their behaviour is vital in the fight against antibiotic resistance.
But don't blame bacteria.
Showing 81–100 of 274 · page 5 of 14
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