The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were infected with a severe complication of E.coli called hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).Surely cucumbers can't be infected with such a syndrome? Isn't it rather that contaminated cucumbers have caused people to become infected with it (or more correctly, that they have caused people to become infected with the strain of e-coli that is associated with it, so that those people have then developed the syndrome itself)? Otherwise, wouldn't we be treating the cucumbers instead of the people?
As if the headline wasn't bad enough - "Deadly Cucumbers Claim More Lives." It sounds like something from an episode of The X-Files.
I've been relying on the BBC website for my daily news for years now. Recently I've started paying for the New York Times online, though - it seems to have much higher standards (not to mention a nice blog where one of the news editors monitors and discusses language errors in the published paper).
It's bad enough having to read all of these student papers with "loose" for lose, "then" for "than" (or is it "than" for "then"? In any case, for a large number of my students the two are pronounced just the same, so it's easy to understand why they get confused) and "effect" for "affect," without having to see the BBC let such careless writing pass too. It makes me wonder why I bother.
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I wrote them a "comment" about it through a form on the BBC site, and today it reads:
The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were contaminated with E.coli which left people ill with hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).Was it because of me? Or a wave of dissenting voices? I don't know.
