4 ms·

its for the clicks. you would think that at least they would say 'hey we are cool, we reported on this before, you should trust us more' but no i think 'hey ne

• signal11 5y ago
  Counterpoint: I read this article and the 2019 BBC piece, this one reports the result of a large scale study which has very positive results. Vs the 2019 article which describes a promising technique with relatively smaller trials. Even lay people who know Wolbachia is promising will find the result interesting. Also the “miraculous” in the headline comes from a a researcher who described Wolbachia as naturally miraculous. I’d say that makes it fair game for a headline writer. The newer article should have mentioned that this technique has been trialled before and provided some context about why this trial is important, eg it was a 3 year RCT, and the evidence it presents is of a higher standard, etc. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that this result is useful and worth a new report — and in fact the “explore further” link on the page on the topic of Mosquitoes links to previous stories on the topic, including the story the previous commenter mentioned. Science and health journalism (other than COVID) isn’t always as sexy as other areas of journalism, I think we should be a little wary of crying “clickbait” for everything. A victory over dengue is worth shouting about — it’s a nasty disease that causes a lot of suffering.