1919 paper leads to today’s news feature on Yahoo: "Flu mystery solved"

Scientists who want to get the results of their work before the public would do well to consider how “Flu mystery solved” became a news feature on today’s Yahoo.

While a newspaper ordinarily reports on current events, a clever writer can leap across a century. The news peg this story hangs on is simple: it's flu season. Key to the article's success are timing, good writing and good science.

The December 10 Yahoo banner linked a reader to Gina Kolata’s story of December 5 in The New York Times, “Study Shows Why Flu Likes Winter.” Kolata relied on a paper that appeared last October in PLoS Pathogens entitled, “Influenza Virus Transmission Is Dependent on Relative Humidity and Temperature.” In the newspaper business, two months is old news.

So how about 88 years? The lead author of the October 2007 study was Peter Palese, who chairs the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. According to Kolata, “the crucial hint that allowed him to do his study came from a paper published in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic” by the American Medical Association in 1919.

That laboratory guinea pigs began to die soon after the long-ago outbreak of influenza in New Mexico inspired Palese and his team to initiate similar experiments in 2006. How they stated their results demonstrates not only a desire to advance science but to be credited with the discovery by their peers:

· “To our knowledge, we demonstrate for the first time that cold temperatures and low relative humidity are favorable to the spread of influenza virus.”

· “We provide direct, experimental evidence to support the role of weather conditions in the dynamics of influenza and thereby address a long-standing question fundamental to the understanding of influenza epidemiology and evolution.”

Kolata addressed the general public differently. She wrote that the virus “is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season” of November through March.

By comparing Kolata’s and Palese’s articles, one can learn more about writing for different audiences and with different goals. As the authors undertook the process of informing their respective readers about aerosol-transmitted flu viruses, their first consideration may have been to use appropriate vocabulary and structure to communicate their key points.

Both pieces are comprehensible to an educated reader of the publications in which they appeared. The Times piece includes additional interviews and links; the PLoS Pathogens paper is replete with references and figures.

The Gopan and Swan article discussed in the post on this blog of December 5 sets forth guidelines for evaluating figures and other aspects of writing:

• Is information placed where a reader would expect to find it?
• Newspaper and scientific journal writing follow conventions in placement of elements. A news story is often built on an inverted pyramid with the most important information at the top, and a journal article is divided into sections with subheadings. Did each author confine topics appropriately or does the information jump around confusingly?
• Did the author put old information in the topic position and new information in the stress position, and give the reader enough background to understand the new?
• Did the author take advantage of the natural structure of thought to lead the reader to key points and control the reader’s perceptions?
• Is the most important information in a sentence toward the end, thus giving it the most natural stress?
• Is the vocabulary appropriate to the reader?
• Does the writing proceed logically or does one sentence contradict another?
• Does the verb closely follow the subject?
• Does the topic sentence of each paragraph link the preceding and following information, providing perspective and context?
• Are hypotheses presented clearly enough to allow the reader to analyze the author's conclusions?
• Is the author convincing?

Answering such questions will help authors improve communication by enhancing style and filling in material needed to support conclusions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/health/research/05flu.html?no_interstitial

http://pathogens.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=
10.1371/journal.ppat.0030151

http://www.amstat.org/publications/jcgs/sci.pdf