FEEDBACK

摘要

Several times a week, Feedback receives alerts from the American Society for Microbiology. We welcome them; our colleagues even find some alerts useful. But we are puzzled by a common streak running through them: an apparent fixation on matters scatological (7 June 2014). We promised then to score each alert out of 7 (that being as good a magic number as any). Our impression is confirmed by the last three announcements at the time of writing: "piglets affected by diarrhea epidemic" (7 points), "bacteriophage spreading antibiotic resistance between bugs in chicken meat" (3 points) and "giant panda gut bacteria" (6 points). But this doesn't take us beyond the discourse analysis so beloved of social scientists.