Blue Henry

The strangely beautiful altered object is an engraved ‘Blue Henry’, a sputum flask carried by tuberculosis (TB) patients in order to collect infected sputum coughed up from their lungs, rather than spit it out. The engraving shows a transmission network of tuberculosis patients revealed through new research by the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project using whole genome sequencing, a technology which is turing our understanding of epidemiology on its head.