In the blood

Bacterial infections might move more slowly than heart attacks, writes Frank Bowden, but they can be just as deadly. The elite world of taxonomic microbiologists ' the people who get to decide what we call our microscopic friends - is divided into the 'lumpers' and the 'splitters.' The lumpers try to minimise the number of families and genuses that bacteria, viruses and other pathogens can scientifically be classified into, while the splitters rejoice in discovering subtle and minor differences between micro-organisms, and love to distinguish them as new species or occasionally to create a new genus. Even as a practising infectious diseases specialist I have trouble keeping up with the names of bugs: every month or so our laboratory sends me a report which names a pathogen that I have never heard of. At the time of writing this, the most recent was Nesterenkonia halobia . I had to ask a colleague what it was. 'Used to be a micrococcus,' she said. 'At least I could spell that.' There is a degree of hypocrisy in this complaint, for I myself belong to a research group that changed the name of a bug.