Talk:Flacherie

Latest comment: 2 years ago by Marvoir in topic Discovery

Categorization

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Hi @MichaelMaggs: This edit seems incorrect to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flacherie&curid=3372919&diff=999518789&oldid=999518735 . Unless you're going to make a category for B. m. diseases or B. diseases, this page belongs in that category. Obviously it should be alphabetized differently than it was: [[Category:Bombycidae|*]]. Invasive Spices (talk) 20:18, 10 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

Invasive Spices I think it should be in a diseases category, which it already is, namely Category:Insect diseases, not a taxonomic category. The moth taxonomy categories are in practice used for the moths themselves, not for things related to moths. Of the 71,000 or so articles I've updated by bot over the last week or so, there can't be more than a handful that - like this one - have just been put into the taxonomic tree 'by association'. Anyway, I don't feel strongly, and I'm happy for you to change or revert the edit if you do. All the best, MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:39, 10 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

Discovery

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Hello @Marvoir: I have reverted the larger change of this edit. See my edit summary for explanation. Invasive Spices (talk) 29 January 2022 (UTC)

This part :
"Louis Pasteur, who began his studies on silkworm diseases in 1865, was the first one able to recognize that mortality due to viral flacherie was caused by infection. (Priority, however, was claimed by Antoine Béchamp.[2]) Richard Gordon described the discovery: "The French silk industry was meanwhile plummeting from a 130 million to an 8 million francs annual income, because the silkworms had all caught pébrine, black pepper disease…He [Pasteur] went south from Paris to Alais, and rewarded them by discovering the silkworm epidemic to be inflicted by some sort of living microbe…Pasteur threw in another disease, flâcherie, silkworm diarrhoea. The cures for both were culling the insects which showed the peppery spots — the peasants bottled the silkworm moths in brandy, for display to the experts — and rigorous hygiene of the mulberry leaf."[3]
is bad. It comes from a book of "amusing anecdotes", a title that does not announce a very serious work. This passage first talks about pébrine, which is not the subject of the Wikipedia article. Moreover, it is false that Pasteur "rewarded them by discovering the silkworm epidemic to be inflicted by some sort of living microbe": other scientists than Pasteur had understood that pebrine was caused by a living organism, but Pasteur claimed to first that they were wrong. He had to withdraw later. Please, read the Louis Pasteur article, section "Silkworm disease". For me, Richard Gordon has no scientific authority. Balbiani, who disregarded Pasteur's theoretical works on silkworm diseases, is a greater authority than Richard Gordon. Marvoir (talk) 16:26, 29 January 2022 (UTC)Reply