Scientists fight scourge of Rapid Abdominal Growth Syndrome

Scientists at Oxford University have announced a major breakthrough in the fight against (RAGS), the highly contagious and embarrassing disease that now afflicts the majority of women aged between 16 and 30 in the UK.

During a summer field trip to the Arndale Shopping Centre in Luton, led by the pioneering Head of Microbiology Professor Toby Custer, a team of researchers spent several hours with a camcorder tracking the movements of the pathogological cell that plays havoc with the abdominal tissue of its receptive female host during the warmer weather.

An incubation period of four to five weeks culminates in a virulent bout of cellular breeding which causes the victim to expand overnight at the midriff by up to six inches in all directions. Bewildered, she spends hours at the mirror, trying on every top and bottom she owns but failing to pull them together over the exposed middle. In a final effort at partial concealment she grabs the elastic waistband of her thong and yanks it as high it will go.

The less prosperous victim of full-blown RAGS may be forced to appear in pitifully undersized garments for weeks at a time while she scrapes together enough credit for a comprehensive refit at Topshop (which to be perfectly honest only solves half the problem). During this period the potential for ridicule is so great that the convalescent's best hope of survival is to behave as if nothing has happened, and silently beg her uninfected friends and business associates not to mention it either.

"There's a long way to go before any practical remedy can be developed and brought to market," the professor emphasised during his keenly-anticipated presentation of the latest findings, "but we've succeeded in isolating the cause. The culprit is the ordinarily benign bacterium bellibutti, one of the tiniest microbes in existence. It comes in four remarkable variants, which you can see modelled on the table over here." And picking them up one at a time, Toby Custer introduced his enthralled audience to the distinctive bright colours and idiosyncratic properties of teeni-weeni, titchi, iota and half-a-mo.

"However, these rather primitive models are the wrong shape," he remarked, tossing the red one casually into the second row where a delighted student caught it. "In their true microscopic form the individual sub-species are dramatically differentiated by their exceptional tininess in one specific dimension. Thus, teeni-weeni is unbelievably short, titchi is impossibly thin, iota is phenomenally flat, and half-a-mo only ever hangs around for an amazingly short space of time."

"And do they really cause RAGS?" asked the second-row student in wide-eyed disbelief as she stroked the furry surface of a massively enlarged and unrealistically still present Half-a-Mo.

"Oh they're the filthy buggers all right. It's when the temperature rises and certain nutrients become plentiful within the host organism that the extraordinary activity occurs. The hitherto neuter microbes abandon their innocent co-existence to engage in a chaotic frenzy of genetic exchange, evolving rapidly through thousands of generations in a six-hour period until all trace of their chromatic and geometric diversity is lost and the untold billions of descendants have achieved a perfectly uniform sepia roundness."

Professor Custer then handed over to his principal research assistant Rosie Vibes, Dip.Sc., one of a new breed of intuitive microbiologists, holding a coveted BTech Diploma in Blue Sky Thinking* from Oxford Brookes University (i.e. the poly) up the road.

"For the past three months," she began, "we've been camped out in the Science Park in pursuit of the critical nutrient essential to the pathological reaction. The conventional view is to point the finger at Starbucks and Prêt-à-Manger, but I've never had one of their sandwiches and look at me." The packed auditorium could only admire the scientific frankness with which the speaker drew attention to her protuberant mid-portion, the unmistakable symptom of a ruthless late-season attack.

"No, it's not diet at all," the celestial researcher explained. "It's something in the ether. Something that went out into the airwaves and woke the bellibutties out of their millennial slumber seven years ago, inciting them to come out and play. During our sun salutations this morning we made the final connection and succeeded in tracing the original release of the nutrient to a seminal emission of CBBC in February 1997. All we need now is the antidote."

They'd better get a move on. Video evidence from the trend-setting malls and arcades suggests that the active ingredient is now present in many of the original victims' mothers and aunts. Casual observers have extrapolated the data to predict a grisly epidemic next summer, with RAGS leaping forward another generation to ravage the over 70s, who so far, thankfully, are immune.

* A qualification founded in memory of Professor John Birt, late Director General of the BBC, who famously did some blue sky thinking about the railways.

Previously

• Scientists develop first 'intelligent' jockey
• Boffins sever conventional wisdom with top-secret shaving project
• Scientists in daring race against computer obsolescence