Mystery bug aces junior player’s Wimbledon hopes

THE mystery deepened this week around a British junior tennis player forced to pull out of Wimbledon with a rare illness. It has been claimed that Gabriella Taylor, 18, who fell ill during her quarter-final match last month, was poisoned – and police are investigating the allegations. But health experts said foul play was highly “unlikely”.

Taylor was seen clutching her stomach while playing American Kayla Day, 16, and lost the first set before conceding the match.

She spent four days in intensive care and came close to death after contracting the highly rare bacterial infection, leptospirosis, which can be carried by cattle, pigs and dogs, but most commonly in rat urine.

Her mother Milena Taylor, 49, claimed it was “impossible” for her daughter to have simply caught the disease. “She was staying in a completely healthy environment. For her to get ill in these circumstances, with rat urine, was just impossible,” she said.

But Professor Elizabeth Wellington, a microbiologist at the University of Warwick, said: “It’s a bit laughable. Spiking a drink is not going to work. To deliberately infect her, she would have to open a wound and they would have had to get it in there – that’s the unbelievable part. It is much more likely she has got it from natural sources rather than biological espionage.”

Dr Peter Fox, a water and environmental consultant, said the idea Taylor was poisoned was a “far stretch”, adding leptospira is “not something you can buy from a shop or online”. – Daily Mail