Emma MarrisAn outbreak of Marburg disease in Angola’sUíge province is spreading, despite the bestefforts of several relief organizations. West-ern aid workers have been unable to win thetrust or understanding of locals, and haveeven come under attack.

Marburg is a rare virus from the samefamily as Ebola. Few people survive thehaemorrhagic fever it causes, but in generalthe virus is contracted only from people who

are visibly sick or dead. In theory, it should besimple to contain an outbreak by keepingsuch people in isolation.

“There is no vaccine, there is no cure. Wehave to break the transmission cycle by let-ting people know not to have contact withthe dead,” says Dave Daigle, a spokesman inUíge for the World Health Organization.However, this causes conflict with families,who want to nurse their sick relatives andprepare bodies for burial.

Workers are trying to quarantine patients,and are sprinkling bleach on body bags in aneffort to replace the strong local custom ofwashing dead bodies. But the paper-suited,respirator-wearing strangers who arrive atthe homes of suspected cases by truck or heli-copter and attempt to remove the ill or deadfrom their families have been met by resent-ment and,on several occasions, rocks.

Relief organizations are scrambling forways to break this cultural impasse. Aidworkers are now accompanied by anthropol-ogists and health educators to help mollifyfamilies and convince them to part with theirrelatives. Religious leaders, including thelocal Catholic bishop, are being drafted todisseminate news about steering clear of theinfected, and the Angolan Red Cross is goingdoor to door.

The remaining members of a traditionalband that lost its lead singer to the virus haveeven put out a song with lyrics about defeat-ing the disease and cooperating with healthworkers. Called Marburg, it is being playedon the radio and from the loudspeakers ofroving trucks.

The World Health Organization andother aid agencies are working to contain thedisease, but the death toll, now at more than200, continues to rise.“I’d like to tell you thatthe numbers are contained,but they are not,”says Daigle. ■

news

946 NATURE | VOL 434 | 21 APRIL 2005 | www.nature.com/nature

Philip BallMost graduate students would be delightedto have a paper accepted for presentation at an international scientific conference.But Jeremy Stribling, a computer-sciencegraduate at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT) in Cambridge, wasn’tsure whether to be amused or alarmed.

His paper, “Rooter: a methodology forthe typical unification of access points andredundancy”, co-authored with DanielAguayo and Maxwell Krohn, was accepted forthe 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics,Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI),to be held in Florida, in July. But Striblingdidn’t write it; he let a computer do it.

Stribling and his colleagues havedeveloped an ‘automatic computer-sciencepaper generator’ that cobbles togetherarticles adorned with randomly generatedgraphs. The ‘results’ are totally spurious.

The MIT researchers say they hoped tocause “maximum amusement” by aping the jargon of the less illustrious papers incomputer science. But they also had a more serious goal: to test whether such

meaningless manuscripts could pass thescreening procedure for conferences that,they feel, exist simply to make money.

‘Rooter’ passed the test: the WMSCIaccepted it, albeit without peer review. Thepaper claims, among other things, that “the famous ubiquitous algorithm for theexploration of robots by Sato et al. runs in�((n�log n)) time”.

It’s not the first example of a hoax paperaimed at exposing poor reviewing andmeaningless jargon. In 1996, US physicistAlan Sokal published a paper on the“hermeneutics of quantum gravity” in thejournal Social Text. Sokal’s paper parodiedthe post-modernist language of somecontributions to that publication andprompted a vigorous debate about theintellectual respectability of ‘cultural studies’.

The WMSCI conferences have beenrunning for ten years, and last year’s meetingattracted nearly 3,000 papers. WMSCI 2005advertises itself as “trying to bridgeanalytically with synthetically orientedefforts, convergent with divergent thinkers”.

The MIT team regards it as one of many

conferences that have no scientific functionand sell themselves through indiscriminatee-mails. “You see lists of speakers, andthere’s no one you’ve ever heard of,” saysStribling. “They spam us.”

Such conferences have sparked anger in the field, as demonstrated by a WMSCIsubmission from David Mazières of NewYork University and Eddie Kohler of theUniversity of California, Los Angeles. Thetitle, text and figures of their ten-page paperconsist entirely of the phrase “Get me offyour fucking mailing list”.

“I don’t know why these conferencesexist,” adds Frans Kaashoek, a member ofthe MIT computer-science group to whichStribling and his colleagues belong.

But the WMSCI’s general chairman,Nagib Callaos, who is based in Venezuelaand has no listed academic affiliation, hasdefended the conference’s decision. “We didnot receive reviews for some papers,” Callaossays. “Since we thought that it was not fair to reject those, we accepted them as non-reviewed ones.” The MIT paper has now been pulled. ■

Computer conference welcomes gobbledegook paper

Marburg workers battle to win trust of locals

Deadly contagion: aid agencies in Angola are working to quarantine patients dying of Marburg fever.

RE

UT

ER

S/N

EW

SCO

M

21.4 news 946 MH 19/4/05 9:58 am Page 946

Nature Publishing Group© 2005