The book’s target audience is children, hence the step-by-step experiments in the style of the children’s television programme Blue Peter, but don’t let that put you off: there is some pretty sophisticated stuff here.

Take the worker honeybees with the same father who as super-sisters share 75 per cent of their genes: by ensuring these sisters reach adulthood, more of their own genes get passed on in the hive.

Winston covers all the bases, from ‘s notions on the origins of simple organisms through to the intricacies of genetics, and he also touches on speciation, shrinking biodiversity, genetic drift, even the ethics of selecting “desirable” traits in your children.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the book inspires any number of wannabe Darwins: bag yourself a copy before they are all gone.

See everything in our pick of the Darwin 200 books

The epicentre of South Africa’s HIV epidemic, KwaZulu-Natal, has another crisis on its hands. This time it is a deadly strain of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, called XDR-TB. The strain, which kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, has already killed at least 74 people in the past few months.

The threat to public health is so great that this concern should override the human rights of an infected individual, believes Jerome Singh, a lawyer at the Centre for AIDS Programme of Research in Durham, South Africa.

Singh says South Africa’s existing strategies are inadequate. Cases have been reported all over the country but there are no infection control centres for XDR-TB, except at King George V Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal which is treating only 11 patients.

Transporting disease

TB in general has a low cure rate because patients do not often complete their course of treatment, which fosters the development drug-resistant strains.

Patients in hospital cannot work and lose their welfare benefits so are unlikely to stay in hospital voluntarily. South Africa’s good public transport system means TB patients granted day-passes from hospital may spread their disease widely.

Singh wants the South African government to follow the example of New York state in the 1990s, where forcible confinement and treatment successfully reduced TB rates. To sweeten the pill, the government needs to reinstate welfare benefits for XDR-TB patients while they are in hospital.

And, because TB is so infectious, Singh thinks beds should be given to them in preference to AIDS patients. Such measures “can help contain the spread but not stop it completely”. The worse case scenario is that XDR-TB is not contained, Singh says, paving the way to a completely drug-resistant strain.

Journal reference: PloS Medicine (vol 4, issue 1, e50)

Routine tests can easily miss infections in the womb, which are one cause of premature births. Such babies often have learning difficulties or, in rare cases, severe brain damage.

Catalin Buhimschi of Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut, US, and colleagues looked for proteins characteristic of inflammation in samples of amniotic fluid taken from 169 women admitted to hospital because they had gone into early labour or because their waters had broken prematurely. The samples were taken by amniocentesis, in which a long hollow needle is inserted through the abdominal wall and into the womb.

From their analysis, the team devised a new amniocentesis test for the inflammatory proteins which was able to pick up on the presence of infection – even low levels – within 15 minutes of testing.

The researchers say that the technique would primarily be used on women going into labour at between 20 and 34 weeks of pregnancy, where the risk to the child of an undiagnosed infection is much greater than the risk of miscarriage due to amniocentesis. Doctors might then be able to treat the infection using antibiotics, steroids or anti-inflammatory drugs in the hope of maintaining the pregnancy.

Journal reference: PLoS Medicine (DOI: 10.137/journal.pmed.0040018)