A while ago I wrote about Carl Zim­mer’s use of the col­lo­quial name daddy-​​longlegs when refer­ring to har­vest­men, and how it hurt the inter­na­tional access­ib­il­ity of his writ­ing. Hon­estly, it wasn’t a big deal at the time (although it did bring in a celebrity com­menter!) and it looks utterly insig­ni­fic­ant com­pared to this. I’m going to assume that Dr Andrew Ross is as com­pet­ent as his pos­i­tion of col­lec­tion man­ager of fossil inver­teb­rates and plants at the Nat­ural His­tory Museum in Lon­don would sug­gest — which is very — and that he simply wasn’t care­ful enough about his use of words in inter­view. Dur­ing the course of the art­icle, he refers to this har­vest­man spe­ci­men both as a spider and in a round­about way as an insect as well. Not only are both incor­rect, but they’re also mutu­ally exclus­ive. It’s a real shame that given the oppor­tun­ity to get the word out and edu­cate the pub­lic a little, a senior employee of the Nat­ural His­tory Museum man­aged, instead, to mis­in­form the pub­lic through some­thing as simple as poor word choice.

Luck­ily there was a safety net this time; the BBC’s journ­al­ist, Rebecca Morelle, clearly knows her stuff, and she pre-​​empts his com­ments with the cor­rect defin­i­tion; that har­vest­men are arach­nids that are closely related to, without actu­ally being, spiders. I just can’t help feel­ing that it shouldn’t fall to a journ­al­ist to cor­rect the expert she quotes.

Even the BBC appears to use them rather too lib­er­ally. Take a look at this art­icle. There’s no sug­ges­tion any­where that the girl might have made it up; ware­house have apo­lo­gised and com­pensated her, the tool in the photo looks like the sort of thing that would be used for cut­ting can­vas in a bag fact­ory; so why the scare quotes around ‘finds blade in bag’ in the head­line? Why say she ‘claims she pulled out a cut­ting device’ rather than just report­ing that she did?

It’s a weird art­icle; I can’t decide if it’s just slop­pily writ­ten, or if the author is try­ing to play on the public’s fear of teen­agers with knives. In either case, it’s below the BBC — they should know better.

This really is the last thing we need.

I’m not talk­ing about the bug itself (although obvi­ously MRSA is a prob­lem and needs to be taken very ser­i­ously,) but about the fact that it seems to have estab­lished itself in the gay com­munity. I haven’t googled to find out, but I’m sure the Reli­gious Right has already got hold of this and stared beat­ing it’s “dangers of an immoral life­style” drum. And if they haven’t, it’s only a mat­ter of time. Mark my words.

For an example, take a look at the Metro’s cov­er­age. Their head­line alone is shock­ingly mis­lead­ing; “Strain of Super­bug ‘may be new HIV’”. I don’t know where they got that quote from (they don’t bother to attrib­ute it any­where in the art­icle,) but I’d love to hear it jus­ti­fied. Is MRSA a virus? Does it attack the immune sys­tem? No. So in what way exactly might it be the new Human Immun­ode­fi­ciency Virus? Oh yes, because it’s a “gay dis­ease.” Just like AIDS. The ignor­ance stag­gers me.

And it gets worse. Fur­ther down the art­icle they write:

MRSA expert Prof Mark Enright, from Imper­ial Col­lege and St Mary’s Hos­pital, Lon­don, said gay com­munit­ies and drug users were par­tic­u­larly at risk. But it could also be spread by those involved in sports, such as wrest­ling, with skin-​​to-​​skin contact.

‘Hav­ing a num­ber of sexual part­ners and mak­ing skin con­tact with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent people is how these infec­tions are picked up,’ he added.

I really hope they’ve ‘mas­saged’ Prof. Enright’s quote, because if not, he should not be called an expert. Gay com­munit­ies and drug users are not “par­tic­u­larly at risk,” and Enright knows it; he says as much in the next para­graph. The people par­tic­u­larly at risk are people who make a lot of dir­ect skin con­tact with a lot of dif­fer­ent people. Now, it might be true that there’s a strong cor­rel­a­tion, that gay people tend to have more dir­ect con­tact with oth­ers than non-​​gay people, but that is utterly irrel­ev­ant; it’s still the con­tact, not being gay that puts those people at risk and to sug­gest oth­er­wise is down­right irresponsible.

Obvi­ously health pro­fes­sion­als have a respons­ib­il­ity to identify trends in dis­ease trans­mis­sion and infec­tion rates, and to try to high­light high-​​risk activ­it­ies and to keep the pub­lic informed; that’s their job and it’s immensely valu­able in pre­vent­ing and treat­ing ill­ness. The prob­lem arises when some rag takes what they’re say­ing and twists it into an art­icle which effect­ively says “Oh noes! Teh Gay! It’s mak­ing us ill! Again!”

Shame on you Metro, for pub­lish­ing this: It’s bad sci­ence, it’s bad journ­al­ism and it’s mor­ally reprehensible.

By now you’ll have all noticed the stor­ies about a newly dis­covered breed of giant sea scor­pion, which ter­ror­ised aquatic envir­on­ments 300 mil­lion years ago. The BBC and CNN have both repor­ted on it. Sloppily.

Quite aside from Kevin Z’s valid cri­ti­cisms of the CNN cov­er­age, the thing both sites have utterly failed to men­tion is that this isn’t that remark­able. I mean, it’s good, inter­est­ing sci­ence, and the team involved have done a great job, but two-​​and-​​a-​​half metre sea scor­pi­ons are not a new dis­cov­ery. In fact it’s only because this recent work has lowered the estim­ated size of a pre­vi­ous find by 40cm that this new dis­cov­ery is con­sidered the largest yet found. I know it makes for bet­ter news if you can make out this is some sort of amaz­ing dis­cov­ery of hitherto unknown giant bugs, but that doesn’t jus­tify neg­lect­ing to men­tion the back­ground to the work.

There’s a great art­icle over at the BBC, about what hap­pens when you give the cli­mate change deni­al­ists a chance to present their side of the argu­ment. You get

The sum total of evid­ence obtained through this open invit­a­tion, then, is one first-​​hand claim of bias in sci­entific journ­als, not backed up by doc­u­ment­ary evid­ence; and three second-​​hand claims, two well-​​known and one that the sci­ent­ist in ques­tion does not con­sider evid­ence of anti-​​skeptic feeling.

While I’m not sur­prised that these people com­plete failed to back up their claims of sys­temic bias in the sci­entific com­munity, I don’t share Mark’s view that the whole exer­cise was a waste of time. Sure, we knew they wouldn’t come up with the goods, but it’s worth doing the leg­work to prove that to the pub­lic at large, espe­cially if you can get that res­ult pub­lished on a hugely pop­u­lar site like the BBC.

Also, if someone goes through these motions every once in a while, then it gives the deni­al­ists less scope to claim they’re being oppressed. Of course they won’t stop; they’ll just claim that this a piece of estab­lish­ment pro­pa­ganda, but for every art­icle like this that is pub­lished, the pub­lic at large will be less inclined to give those claims credence.