Just as beds are infested with dust mites, my July 19, 2005 column in The Guardian was infested with little errors. There were at least two:
J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, author of "A Bed Ecosystem," is a her, not a him. I apologize to Professor van Bronswijk. This was plainly, simply an error on my part.
H.R. Sesay’s co-author of "Studies on the Mite Fauna of House Dust in Scotland With Special Reference to That of Beddings" is not R.H Dobson. R.H. Dobson is married to, but is an entirely distinct person from, R.M. Dobson. This, too, was an error on my part, and a slightly more complicated one. (Here’s how I managed to unmeritoriously adopt the error and make it my own. I first encountered the Sesay/Dobson study as a citation in another paper, K. Solarz’s "Seasonal Dynamics of House Dust Mite Populations in Bed/Mattress Dust From Two Dwellings in Sosnowiec (Upper Silesia, Poland): An Attempt to Assess Exposure." The reference list of the Solarz paper includes this citation:
"41. Sesay HR, Dobson RH: Studies on the mite fauna of house dust in Scotland with special reference to that of beddings. Acarologia 1972, 14, 384-392.") My apologies to the Dobsons!
–Marc