Anthrax has hit Glasgow: the story of a desperate hunt for its source

Scotland has an estimated 50,000 heroin users, many of whom can be found on the streets of Glasgow. Today, the signs of the city's drug problem are visible even in the city centre where addicts can be seen sitting on the pavement, leaning against walls and staring listlessly into the distance. Hope House, a hostel for the homeless on the edge of the Clyde, provides a refuge for many of them.

It was at this shelter that a 35-year-old heroin addict called Donny (not his real name) woke up on a December morning in 2009 with an unbearable pain in his thigh. On most days, Donny followed a familiar routine that had been engraved upon his life by his drug habit. He would walk over a bridge across the river to a neighbourhood on the opposite bank that was once a leper colony, and is now home to council housing. There, Donny would buy heroin from a dealer and visit his partner and two children. After taking a hit in their flat, he would wander back to his hostel. But on this day, Donny could barely walk. His thigh, right where he injected himself, was so inflamed that he had trouble dragging himself out of bed. Donny's partner called an ambulance for him -- he would never have gone to the hospital by himself --and he was taken to the nearby Victoria Infirmary.

The doctors at Victoria -- as at other Glasgow hospitals -- were used to seeing heroin addicts show up with lesions in the arms, legs and other parts of the body where the users had been plunging a needle into their flesh. Such infections, the doctors knew, are typically caused by a bacterium called Bacillus cereus that is often behind food poisoning. But, when pathologists examined some of Donny's blood under a microscope, they saw a far more deadly germ. It was anthrax.