Revision of IDO Core treatment of Treatment Agents

[PhiBabs935]

John has suggested that we remove terms like antiviral, antibacterial, (etc), which are classes for representing treatments agents that either have the disposition to kill pathogens or the disposition to inhibit the reproduction of pathogens.

These are to be replaced with separate terms for treatment agents that bear a 'cidal disposition', which is a disposition to kill pathogens... and terms for treatment agents that bear a 'static agent disposition', which is a disposition to inhibit the reproduction of pathogens.

If we go this route, I think that at the very least we should add appropriate comments to terms like 'cidal agent' and 'static agent' that explain that the treatment agents that they refer to are commonly classified disjunctively under terms like antiviral and antibacterial. I think that this is very important, as I suspect that the disjunctive terms are more familiar to most and some might not immediately recognize the more specific terms.

[johnbeve]

I'm more than happy to add comments to aid understanding, of course.

That said, from what I've seen the terms "static agent" and "cidal agent" are somewhat common in medical microbiology, virology, etc., literature, so I think I'm less worried about them being misunderstood.

I should add too, my motivation for using these terms over the more familiar terms stemmed from what seemed to me confusing disorganization in the original IDO hierarchy. In the original IDO there was a class for 'antimicrobial' with subclasses 'microbicidal' and 'microbistatic' as well as 'antiviral' with subclasses 'virostatic' and 'viricidal'. But antivirals are antimicrobials, as are antibacterials and antifungals. However, antiparasitics aren't antimicrobials, since the target pathogens aren't always microbes, e.g. tape worms. So, we'd antimicrobials with antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal subclasses, but which was a sibling class of antiparasitic. I felt this could be cleaned up. After searching through the literature, I felt comfortable overhauling treatment classes in these terms.

[PhiBabs935]

I see. If Lindsay approves these changes, then down the road we will have to change the discussion of treatment agents in the IDO paper.

Maybe we should move the discussion of treatment agents to a later subsection of the section on recent IDO developments. We can note the previous coverage in IDO, and then talk about the revised treatment you created, adding a more polished version of what you said here to explain why we updated it.

[johnbeve]

I'm assuming we'll be asked to revise the IDO 2020 paper, so if these changes are accepted I think we can add them in, in the way you suggest without much trouble.