Doughnut road trip strikes nerve
When does a walnut crunch strike a nerve? When it’s featured in a travel story about enticing doughnut stores across the province.
For editors, selecting content amidst the changing restrictions of the pandemic can be a challenge. Horoscopes and advice columns written weeks ahead of time have occasionally been out of step with the latest recommendations of public health officials by the time they get published.
Travel content too has been a tricky area, given the urgings of politicians to stay home and the tightening of restrictions around international travel.
The Star published an article this month, during the most recent lockdown, about four “old-school” doughnut stores in Kingston, Ajax, Hamilton and Niagara Falls. “Time to make a doughnut road trip,” declared the print headline.
Or not, as several of you forcefully wrote the Star.
“Why are you promoting travel during a pandemic lockdown in our region? For donuts, of all things?” said one reader.
“It’s exceptionally irresponsible to be posting this article when travel should not be occurring,” wrote another.
I heard similar concerns earlier this year after an article about the small-town charms of Dundas. The story was labelled “future travel,” but that was little comfort to local residents who feared the town was about to be overrun.
In the doughnut article, the author did flick at the restrictions, saying “I dream of the day I’ll be able to visit them again.”
Given that the public health restrictions have been front and centre in the Star’s news coverage with reporters and columnists writing on the latest developments, readers have not been in the dark.
Still, I acknowledge the concerns. The front page of the travel section does carry this note: “We understand the restrictions on travel during the coronavirus pandemic. But like you, we dream of travelling again and are publishing these stories with future trips in mind.”
That note now accompanies online travel stories as well, such as one on winter bird watching, in order to underscore the message.
Some wonder why we are writing travel pieces at all.
I don’t mind such stories with the caveat that one reads them as ideas for future travel, rather than encouragement to immediately hit the road. If we can’t visit Cancun or Paris, perhaps the next best thing is reading about such trips. Such articles are a welcome distraction, and help us dream of the days when we can pack a bag and head out across the province, the country or around the world.
But only when it’s safe and responsible to do so — a point I think most readers understand.
Vaccinations or inoculations?
In its COVID-19 coverage, Star stories have interchanged the terms vaccination and inoculation. A reader challenged the choice of words: “These are vaccinations, not inoculations. The latter term is reserved for injections of live viruses.”
So which term is correct? I reached out to the University of Ottawa for some expert advice.
“They do not mean the same thing. However, in the real world, they generally are used interchangeably. Vaccination has a more narrow meaning, while inoculation can relate to many more things,” Dr. Nicholas Birkett, an associate professor at the university’s School of Epidemiology and Public Health, wrote in an email.
“Vaccination means injecting a vaccine into the body. This is normally a weakened/harmless version of the virus or bacteria although, as with COVID, it can be things like mRNA. It stimulates your immune system to fight off the real virus/bacteria,” he said.
The word comes from the Latin for cow and dates to the work by Edward Jenner in finding a vaccination for smallpox, Birkett said. Jenner noted that cowmaids didn’t get smallpox but cowpox, a related though less serious disease. Injecting people with cowpox stopped them getting smallpox, he said.
“Smallpox of cows was given the Latin name: Variolae vaccinae. Hence, injecting cowpox into humans became ‘vaccination’,” Birkett said.
“Inoculation means injecting something into the body to produce disease or stimulate the body to fight off a disease. Vaccination involves injecting something into the body to prevent disease. So, vaccination is a type of inoculation. But scientists can also inject an active virus into an animal … This would be an inoculation but not a vaccination,” he wrote.
“To answer the specific question, I would say it is right to call a vaccination an ‘inoculation’ but not the other way around,” Birkett said.
Marc-André Langlois, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Canada Research Chair in Molecular Virology and Intrinsic Immunity at the university, offered this explanation:
“Immunization = inoculation: To render immunized or to stimulate the immune system to counteract a pathogen. This can happen through natural exposure or vaccines,” he wrote in an email.
“Vaccination: To render immunized through a vaccine. Simply a specific way to inoculate. If you administer a vaccine to stimulate immunity to a pathogen: you are vaccinating and inoculating, and therefore [the two terms] can be used interchangeably.”