CST this bit of news might effect the price, page-14

G'day all,

At the risk of dragging this on I just have a further comment or two.

The article in question is written by Janathan Amos who is a staff science journalist for the BBC and is currently attending a science forum in Leicester. He has written a wide variety of articles about a very wide range of science issues. From the little I know about this type of journalism, basically what happens is he collects a brochure or two from a presentation, has brief chat (if he's lucky), then grabs a pile of stock research to put together an article to meet a deadline.

If you look at the article very closely you can almost see the stitches where it has been stitched together. Basically the first sentence and the last paragraph are the news, the rest is filler. This give us an article that reads:

A new DNA test has been developed to isolate a strain of tuberculosis in a matter of hours.

The new Leicester test will not be employed as a front-line diagnostic tool to detect the presence of the disease, but it is already being used in identifying the strain involved in an outbreak and studying how this is related to those involved in other cases.

Mr Amos has then stitched in several other pieces of information.

A. A rehash of last years outbreak at Leicester.

B. Some widely available statistics.

C. The fact that the UK Govt are planning to tackle TB head on starting next year.

There is nothing wrong with doing that of course - he has to make the article interesting. His one mistake was a single paragraph where he mentions the TST test. By mentioning the TST test he incorrectly implies that the DNA test can be compared with the TST test. The rest of the article clearly shows that not to be the case. The unfortunate thing is that he made a gross factual error in the very same paragraph. The TST test takes 72 hours max, not "several weeks".

I have tried to find an email address for Jonathan Amos just so that I can chat with him about it but I can't find it.

I know that no-one is particularly interested in all of this but at least it keeps me off the streets.