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The Mill: The Local Paper, June 1980

Whately's Mill closed on Friday with the loss of 214 jobs, the largest single closure in the town since the war. The mill had run since 1868. At its height it employed more than 600. Mr Whately declined to say when he had known the closure was certain. The Chamber of Commerce has called for a public inquiry; the union has called the closure "predictable for two years". The council says a retraining fund will open in September. Four other textile mills within twenty miles have closed since 1975. Nobody the paper spoke to expected the site to be used for textiles again.

How a Vaccine Teaches the Body

Your immune system learns. Meet a disease once and, if you survive it, you are usually protected afterwards. A vaccine gives the lesson without the disease. The method is old. In eighteenth-century Britain, milkmaids were known not to catch smallpox. Edward Jenner reasoned that the cowpox they caught from cattle was protecting them, and in 1796 he tested it on a boy — a procedure no ethics committee would permit now. A modern vaccine shows the immune system a harmless piece of a pathogen: a killed virus, a weakened one, or a single protein from its surface. The body makes antibodies against that piece, and keeps the recipe. Because the recipe is kept, the real pathogen is met by a defence already in place. There is a second effect. If enough people are immune, the pathogen cannot find a chain of hosts, so those who cannot be vaccinated are protected too. That effect fails below a threshold, which is why coverage rather than availability is what matters.