Letter from the Authors

Authors Reply to L Jones-Engel, G Engel, A Fuentes and M Schillaci:

We are responding to correspondence received from Jones-Engel and colleagues regarding an article published in the Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology titled “The infectious disease consequences of monkey business”, which highlighted the public health concerns of cross-species transmission of infectious agents from nonhuman primates to humans (1). Although the article provided several references to the work of Jones-Engel and her colleagues, she has brought to our attention instances of lack of citation of her work regarding specific statements made in the article, poor and/or improper paraphrasing, lack of quotation marks for specific phrases and lack of attributing findings and observations to their work. Dr Jones-Engel correctly points out that her and her co-authors’ published data are the result of decades of international fieldwork, carefully planned research and collaboration, and represent original scholarly work. As the authors of the article in the Journal, we acknowledge that it is incorrect to not properly credit the data sources when those data are not the result of our own original scholarly activity, and we regret that we were not more rigorous in that regard. As a reminder to our readers, the “Adult Infectious Diseases Notes” series in the Journal represents opinions or short summaries/reviews of topical items to our readership and does not represent original work, which is provided in the original article series. The article was written as a ‘public service’ type reminder about the need for awareness of the risks of contact with primate populations in these settings and as noted, an increasingly popular tourist destination for travelers from Canada. As authors of the review article, we did not deliberately or willfully attempt to misattribute any information in our article to original research conducted by ourselves, but we acknowledge and sincerely regret any lack of citations, poor and/or improper paraphrasing, and lack of specific quotation marks that might have led to that appearance. The Journal agreed that a response from the authors in an open and transparent manner was appropriate. We would like to thank Dr Jones-Engel and her colleagues for bringing this to our attention.