Dr Pollen Count dies aged 108
He led fight against hay fever (and even told Saddam to quit smoking)
DR William Frankland, the acclaimed allergy expert who popularised the pollen count to help hay fever sufferers, has died at the age of 108.
During his extraordinary life and career, he was a clinical assistant to Sir Alexander Fleming – the Scot who in 1928 discovered penicillin – and endured more than three years in Japanese PoW camps during the Second World War.
Dr Frankland’s work on hayfever involved him setting up a pollen trap on the roof of St Mary’s Hospital, London in the 1950s to identify different types of pollen in the air. Along with his team, he then created a pollen count system that led to daily pollen reports in the media.
He also expounded the ‘hygiene theory’, linking the rise in people with allergies to higher levels of hygiene, which means we are no longer exposed to as many micro-organisms or allergens, and so do not build up immunity to them over time.
Such was his inquisitiveness, he even experimented on himself. While investigating the concept of desensitisation – a treatment aiming to reduce the intensity of an allergic reaction by repeated exposure to the allergen – he acquired an inch-long South American insect known as a ‘kissing bug’. He let it dine on his arm at weekly intervals. Unfortunately, instead of becoming desensitised, he reacted more and more intensely – and ended up needing three shots of adrenaline.
In another potentially dangerous encounter, in 1979 Dr Frankland was invited to visit a ‘VIP’ in Baghdad – and found he had been summoned to treat the country’s new leader Saddam Hussein, who was claiming to have asthma and that he was allergic. Dr Frankland found that in fact the Iraqi dictator had a 40-a-day cigarette habit.
He ordered him to stop smoking and said: ‘If you’re causing your own problems there’s no point wasting my time seeing you.’
Recalling the incident in an interview with the Mail in 2017, Dr Frankland said: ‘I was later told, though I don’t know if it’s true, that Saddam shot his Minister of Health after he’d had a disagreement with him.’
Dr Frankland was also known as Britain’s, and possibly the world’s, oldest working doctor, with his opinion still sought by colleagues around the world when he was aged well over 100. He passed away peacefully in his sleep on Thursday at the care home in London where he had lived for the last two years.
Friends said Dr Frankland – known as Bill – was in fine spirits when he celebrated his 108th birthday on March 19, even though a large gathering of his family was not possible amid the Covid-19 outbreak.
Speaking last month Dr Frankland put his longevity down to luck, saying: ‘I like to think the reason I’ve lived so long is that I’ve got “guardian angels”! I’ve come close to death so many times – from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, three and a half years spent as a Japanese Prisoner of War, to experiencing anaphylaxis…but somehow I’ve always managed to miss it and that’s why I’m still here.’
Asked for his views on coronavirus, Dr Frankland described it as ‘worrying’, adding: ‘I think there are a lot of challenges ahead. It’s great to see scientists, working so quickly to help tackle the pandemic. I’m also in awe of all the clinical and health care staff on the front line.’
Historian Dan Snow paid tribute to Dr Frankland as ‘one of the greatest Britons’. The doctor, who was made an MBE in 2015 for services to allergy research, is survived by four children. His wife Pauline died in 2002.
‘One of the greatest Britons’