Blue Collar Scientist

Blackwell Publishing has kicked out a press release with a slightly unfortunate hed:

Cholera Study Provides Exciting New Way Of Looking At Infectious Disease

Now, the study that this press release reports is kind of exciting. (And yes, you can read it for free.) Basically, the investigators are looking at Vibrio cholerae, the pathogen that causes cholera, a disease characterized by massive diarrhea and very rapid death if untreated.

It was long thought that humans were the source of cholera, but in the last several years there’s been quite a bit of evidence that it actually lives in aquatic environments. This study explores how cholera interacts with chitin, the polysaccharide that makes up the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans. The findings of the researchers, in brief, show that cholera’s interactions with chitin explains a lot about how cholera lives, expands its range, and infects humans.

This is of course a good thing - knowing about this will lead to strategies that will save lives and greatly reduce suffering. And it is also good that the investigators are excited by their work. I’d hate for the evolutionary¹ and molecular biologists who work on human disease to be, you know, apathetic, or worse, bored about what they do.

But that hed…. I just can’t get past the idea that we should be careful about saying we are excited about infectious disease, for the same reason that when a client telescope crashes in a novel way, I avoid calling the event “awesome” or “cool” in front of the client - even though it is pretty cool what you can learn about these complex systems from their failure modes.

But the headline doesn’t really matter - the release is good, the science appears sound, and the utility of the findings is unquestionable. This time, I’ll take what I can get.

1. And guess what - this study did depend upon evolutionary theory and methods to come to its conclusions. Yet another example of the way that evolution helps us all. [↩]