- When Brian Bennett, a retired truck driver, began a series
of amateur experiments in the garage of his Nuneaton home, he never imagined
that the results could save thousands of lives. Nor did he consider that
his dabblings might one day earn him a multimillion- pound fortune. But,
armed with nothing more than a few reference books from his local library,
Bennett succeeded in concocting a substance whose properties appear to
be nothing short of miraculous - a wonder-cream that promises to eradicate
the scourge of hospital "superbugs", and may also clear up psoriasis,
eczema and acne into the bargain. Unsurprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry
is now falling over itself to snap up the patent on a product with the
sales potential to put even Viagra in the shade.
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- Bennett has found himself - reluctantly - at the centre
of a media whirlwind, as reports of his invention have spread around the
world. I caught up with him at a London hotel the evening before he was
due to appear on ITV's This Morning show.
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- "I just wish it were all over," he says, in
a broad Midlands accent. Bennett looks bushed. He slumps in the leather
sofa, sipping his tonic water and smoking like a Coventry chimney stack.
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- The 65-year-old diabetic hardly looks like the saviour
of the NHS - or anyone else for that matter - but he is. Hospital-acquired
infections kill 5,000 people in England each year. Managing these infection
outbreaks costs the NHS a staggering £1bn annually. The best weapon
that hospitals have for fighting this menace is compulsive hand-washing.
But the problem with washing is that as soon as the tap is turned off,
the person's hands are open to reinfection. Fortunately, Bennett's lotion
remains active for an entire shift. It could save the NHS a lot of money.
It could save people's lives. Bennett calls it the "invisible glove".
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- His motivation for creating this substance was a very
personal one. Bennett's 42-year-old partner, Heather, had a persistent
case of contact dermatitis from handling money at the local post office,
where she worked. Barrier creams didn't work, and steroid creams only cleared
up the condition temporarily. So, three years ago, he set about finding
a cure for his wife's skin condition. But why did Bennett, a man who failed
GCSE biology, think that he could do better than pharmaceutical companies,
with their legions of PhDs and colossal budgets? "It's not a matter
of thinking that I could outdo the pharmaceutical companies," he says.
"It was just a case of desperation when I saw Heather's suffering."
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- Bennett doesn't believe in intractable problems. He has
always been an inventor at heart - if the product that he needs doesn't
exist, he just makes it. Driven by Heather's dermatitis, he purchased a
barrel of barrier cream and started adding ingredients: aloe vera, evening
primrose oil, triclosan (a powerful antibacterial agent), silicon, and
so on. There was no industrial mixer to blend the ingredients, so Bennett
called his "strapping" sons to help him roll the 200l barrel
up and down the driveway until the cream was thoroughly mixed.
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- It took 40 rolls to reach the right consistency. "I
took some of the mixture and gave it to my wife," says Bennett. "Within
three days, there was a dramatic lessening of the dermatitis; within seven
or eight days, it had cleared up almost completely."
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- Soon, Bennett was giving the lotion to any friend or
relative who had a skin condition. They all reported positive results,
whether it was for their eczema, acne or psoriasis. At first, Bennett didn't
think of his wonder-lotion as a potential goldmine, he was just glad that
his wife's dermatitis had finally cleared up, but then a friend contacted
him to say that a South Korean company was interested in the lotion and
wanted to buy 10,000 bottles. Bennett and his sons rushed down to Halfords,
bought a cheap compressor, and set up a mini production plant in the garage.
Over the next four and a half days, working day and night, they completed
the order. "My son would fill the bottles and I'd put the cap on and
the labels, and I'd pass it to my other son and he'd put it in the box,"
says Bennett.
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- But no sooner had they completed their first consignment
than the dream of a lucrative export market collapsed. The head of the
Korean company who ordered the lotion died in a car crash, and no more
orders followed.
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- The budding enterprise might have ended there, but sitting
at the traffic lights one day, Bennett noticed a company name on the back
of a van: "Pet's Life International", it said. Before the lights
could change, he scribbled down the name and the phone number of the company.
"We're pet daft in our family," says Bennett. "My wife breeds
and shows Siamese cats, and her mother has bred German shepherd dogs for
36 years. I knew through past experience that if any of the animals got
a cut or a scratch, and I put my cream on them, within 24 hours it would
clear up. So I knew it was good for animals, and I just thought I'd give
the company a ring."
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- When Bennett called the company and told them about his
lotion, John Hancock, the proprietor of Pet's Life, invited him up to his
production plant in Lincolnshire. He took some of Bennett's lotion and
promised to put it out to a few vets to test. Three months later, Hancock
invited Bennett to join the company. Pet's Life bought an exclusive on
the cream, and they began to sell it as Vet Shield.
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- By now, Bennett had caught the entrepreneurial bug. He
was constantly on the lookout for new markets. He realised that hairdressers
suffer from contact dermatitis because of the shampoos and conditioners
they handle, so he set up a label exclusively for hair salons called B4Hand.
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- But the lotion might have remained more snake oil than
Lorenzo's Oil if it hadn't been for the MRSA outbreaks, about 16 months
ago. Bennett knew that his product had strong antibacterial properties,
and that it worked for extended periods of time, so he decided to approach
the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham to see whether they could use
the lotion to stop cross-infections. After much persistence, Bennett was
eventually granted a brief meeting with Professor Tom Elliott. "He
really didn't have a clue what I had come to see him about," recalls
Bennett. "I told him about the cream, and said I thought it would
be very useful for nurses and porters and people like that. I gave him
some samples and he put it in the lab."
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- For six weeks, two doctors put the lotion on their hands,
and did their normal rounds. At night, they swabbed their hands. What they
found was that there was still 70 per cent antibacterial activity on their
skin. "Professor Elliot did a lot more tests in the lab and found
that it was killing the bugs damn quick," says Bennett. "So he
decided to write a protocol in the Journal for Hospital Infections. He
recommended at the end of the letter that the cream needed to undergo a
clinical trial."
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- Initial tests showed that the lotion killed MRSA, and
other lethal bacteria, in a test tube. Based on these encouraging results,
Professor Elliott set up a clinical trial to test the lotion's effectiveness
as an antibacterial hand-ointment. A hundred and two staff at the hospital
took part in the trial, which involved half the group applying the lotion
to their hands, and the other half - the control group - using standard
hygiene practices, ie, using alcohol washes to clean their hands. The results
surprised the researchers. The lotion killed bacteria within seconds of
being applied, and lasted for at least three hours after application. "The
results are exciting in as much as we have found that the base to this
treatment - silicon - retains the anti-microbial activity even if volunteers
wash their hands with soap and water several times during a three -hour
period," says Professor Elliott. "There are two areas in which
it could be of value. One is everyday use in the clinical environment;
the other is in pre-operative skin preparation for patients."
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- In the meantime, Bennett had the opportunity to put his
money where his mouth is and try the lotion as a pre-op skin preparation.
Prior to undergoing a knee-replacement operation, he asked the surgeons
if he could administer the ointment to his leg. The hospital's ethical
committee gave the green light. "I had no infection whatsoever,"
says Bennett, "and infections are a major problem with knee- replacement
operations." Dr Tony Worthington, the clinical research scientist
who conducted the clinical trial with Bennett's lotion, would like to perform
further tests on renal dialysis patients, because of the high incidence
of MRSA infection among this group of people.
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- Although there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that
Bennett's lotion works for athlete's foot, eczema, and acne, no clinical
trials have been conducted to prove the lotion's efficacy for these conditions,
but a number of companies are offering to buy the patent and fund the trials.
Bennett says that he can't discuss the sums they are talking about, "because
it has gone over my head". The hospitals have told him that if the
cream does what they believe it can do, then you can't put a figure on
what it will be worth. "It could be the answer to a lot of problems,"
says Bennett. And then, with typical modesty, he adds: "It will save
a lot of... well, I don't want to say lives." But "lives"
is exactly right.
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- Multi-drug resistant bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant
staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), are a growing problem in hospitals around
the world. MRSA usually infects people with open wounds, or those who have
recently had surgery, and it is commonly passed on through direct contact.
Although hospitals do encourage their staff to wash their hands between
patients, it doesn't appear to be enough. The rates of MRSA were 50 times
higher in 2001 than they were in 1992.
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- The Liberal Democrats say that the Government's Clean
Hospital Campaign is "a sham". A report issued by the Liberal
Democrats earlier this month accused the Government of "utter and
extreme complacency" in handling hospital infections. The report,
Now Wash Your Hands 2, finds damning evidence of "superbug" cases
reaching record levels, and a system ill-equipped to deal with the situation,
despite continued warnings. They say that there were just over 7,000 reported
cases of MRSA last year, compared with under 1,000 in 1996. It is hardly
surprising that more and more NHS doctors are choosing to have their operations
done in private hospitals, where infection rates are much lower.
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- Since the hospital put out the press release about the
clinical-trials results, Bennett has been inundated with calls and e-mails
from people suffering from a variety of skin conditions. The calls come
from as far afield as Japan and Colombia. Locally, people have tracked
Bennett down through the electoral roll. Friends whom he hasn't seen for
two years or more are suddenly turning up on his doorstep.
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- "I didn't expect all this attention," he says.
"If this had come out of a laboratory, you probably wouldn't have
heard anything about it other than 'a certain laboratory scientist has
made a breakthrough', and that would have been it. But because I am an
ex-truck driver, it has just gone crazy."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=533431
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