[Leish-l] load or burden?

Carlos Costa chncosta at gmail.com
Thu Mar 9 07:27:05 BRT 2017


Dear colleagues,

I am finishing a paper and got stuck with the use of the terms load or
burden to define the amount of Leishmania infantum in a vertebrate host.

I used the term burden. A professional translating company started to use
load instead but finally led both terms in the text.

Looking at the Websters dictionary, I could not find differences between
them (in the sense we used in the paper).

However, when looking at PubMed the terms were used differently, depending
on the type of organism. The statistics were:
HIV burden: 6,230; HIV load: 23,266
HCV burden: 1,040; HCV load: 4,904
Plasmodium burden: 978; Plasmodium load: 465
Leishmania burden: 691; Leishmania load: 651

Is the question is irrelevant and are both terms interchageable or one is
better for viruses while the other is better for parasites? Do the PubMed
votes matter or is democracy a fools' realm?

Is it less elegant to use both in a text or should just one be used in each
paper/situation?

Provoking specially the English speaking colleagues (but not only them)!

Cheers,

Carlos.

-- 
Carlos H. N. Costa, MD, DSc.
Chefe/Head
Departamento de Medicina Comunitária
Centro de Ciências da Saúde
Coordenador/Coordinator
Laboratório de Leishmanioses - LabLeish
Instituto de Doenças Tropicais Natan Portella
Universidade Federal do Piauí
Rua Artur de Vasconcelos 151-Sul
64001-450 Teresina-PI
Brazil
Telephones: +55 86 3222-4377 (W),
+55 86 3221-3062 (W),
+55 86 3237-1075 (R).


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