I feel the pain. What happens if you click "yes"? Inquiring minds....

Antibiotics were effective on infant mortality in the MORDOR trial and in other trials - that's why they did this trial to follow up. Also vaccines, bednets, many other interventions good for mortality as well as schooling.

Sure, fair enough, and I can see that in the Ethiopia/Trachoma context the transmission effect might be key, but I think less easy to see that in MORDOR, and also if key mortality is GNR sepsis hard to imagine population level transmission reductions except with WASH. All very puzzling.

Yeah, but what should public health do with the infrastructure changes - give azithromycin or not give azithromycin? It seems like there might be lives at stake if it is got wrong.

Would that imply that all or at least most of the transmission is happening in the under 5 year old age group? I would have thought that where WASH is a challenge there would be broader transmission than that?

Completely agree, one often doesn't want to take the chance. Refusing to cite a paper or two does not seem like the right hill to die on.

If the journalist really thinks the answer is "yes" then they would make the headline declarative. The question is when they know it is nonsense but want the clickbait of "raising the question".

I have sometimes felt "coerced" to include citations with a "major revision" hanging over me. The argument that one's own papers are important and need citing needs evaluating against the purpose of a background section - it is not a systematic literature review but a minimal introduction.

It's that law of headline questions - when a question is asked in a headline the answer is almost always "No".