It first appeared in issue 2374, dated 16 January 1988, replacing the Rasher strip, where the characters had been introduced the previous week.

[1] The strip was about a boy called Will who had three germs inside him (Ugly Jack Bacteria, Jeremy Germ, and Iris the Virus), and they were constantly making Will ill, requiring many visits to the doctor.

The strip was originally drawn by David Sutherland, and was taken over by Vic Neill later on.

Due to Neill's work on Billy Whizz and Tim Traveller, the strip appeared on an increasingly irregular basis in the late 1990s, and after Neill's death in 2000, it disappeared from The Beano.

It returned to the comic in October 2011 as reprints of the David Sutherland strips, and later Vic Neill reprints in April 2012, along with Number 13, this time retitled as Totally Gross Germs.