Bibliographic record
Abstract
Veraldi and Esposito1 reported seven cases of an intense and unusual skin reaction of tourists in Bolivia, ostensibly to the bites of the horsefly Tabanus bovinus. I write to question the identity of the supposed insect agent and also to make strong recommendations to correct what appears to have been a lack of editorial oversight and due diligence in the management of this manuscript. Tabanus bovinus Linnaeus is a Palaearctic species, found in Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia2; the probability that this species could have been transported to Bolivia, alive and in numbers, is extraordinarily remote. In the manuscript, the authors did not state how they made the identification of the fly; Dr Veraldi (in litt. 5 October 2017) informed me that he had made the identification but did not state what taxonomic keys or other aids were used in the determination of the species. At least 25 species of Tabanus are known from Bolivia3; unfortunately Fig. 1 of the manuscript, a photo of the head and a portion of the thorax of one of three specimens brought back to Europe, provides insufficient diagnostic information to even speculate on the identity of the fly, and, regrettably, Dr Veraldi informed me that the three specimens have been discarded. A reliable identification of the species would have been very valuable—the reaction was intense and of a magnitude that none of my tabanid-researcher colleagues or I have ever seen. As well, both in North and South America, species of Tabanus very rarely attack the upper body of people, preferring to bite on the legs. So, we are left with an unusual reaction to, possibly, an unknown tabanid. The editors should establish and enforce a set of guidelines for the identification of agents impacting human health, whether they be infectious agents such as bacteria, fungi and viruses, or parasites and insect pests—assurance must be given to readers that the agents have been identified by qualified experts, and as well, there should be a requirement that voucher specimens be deposited in a reputable archive or museum so that, in the event of an identification challenge, queries can be quickly and authoritatively resolved. I am confident that readers of this journal would not support or condone entomologists practicing medicine; similarly, MDs should not be practicing entomology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".