It will come as no surprise to those interested in science that there is a lot of shoddy science coverage out there. The past week alone featured two very poorly reported stories. The first is a zombie conspiracy theory about evil drug companies, and the second is a paper that lays the blame for the global bee decline on GSM cellphones.

The zombie in question concerns dichloroacetate (DCA), which conspiracy theorists would have us believe is a cancer cure-all that's being suppressed by the might of big pharma, which is upset that it's not patent-eligible. It's an odd conspiracy, since the Orphan Drug Act would probably allow the FDA to grant market exclusivity to whichever company conducted the relevant trials, but fist-waving about evil drug companies makes for much better copy.

For a more thorough debunking of the DCA zombie, PZ Myers and Orac have both got you covered. In short, there have been promising animal results, but no clinical trials have been completed at this point. Why the DCA story continues to come back from the dead, we're not sure. The article claims a 2011 date for the press release it regurgitates, but it also links to the researcher's website where an identical press release seems to have been published almost exactly a year ago.

Next up was a claim that the dramatic decline in the world's bee population was a result of mobile phones, which appeared on a site that really ought to have known better. Following the link trail on this one is like a science writer's version of Dante's Inferno, with each click taking the reader to a new and more terrible circle of hell.

On the journey, we get things like the totally unsourced claim that "over 83 experiments have yielded the same results." Over 83? That's remarkably specific. Wouldn't it have been simpler to say 84? If that didn't set off warning lights, finding out that the next stop was the UK's Daily Mail really should have.

Needless to say, not one of the three articles does anything helpful like link to actual research, although the Mail is kind enough to identify the name of the journal it was published in. A minute or two on Google dug up the paper, which was published in Apidologie; you can find a copy of it here since the DOI is not resolving yet.

The author demonstrates that cell phone EM radiation is capable of disturbing bees, but did so by placing cell phones inside the bee hives. The paper even states that this is unrealistic, a fact acknowledged by the Daily Mail, which notes that "[t]he study did not show that mobile phones were deadly for bees." Presumably neither the Inhabitat nor the Grist writers actually read that far.

The bee paper seems to have been in publication limbo for almost a year, during which time we've seen much more convincing research that implicates fungal and viral culprits, as well as neonicotinoid pesticides. Furthermore, US cases of colony collapse disorder have happened in remote rural areas where cell phone radiation is unlikely to be a factor.

All in all, it's a rather depressing reminder of the fact that there's still a lot of bad, misleading science writing out there. No wonder the general public's science literacy is still so poor.

Apidologie, 2011. DOI: 10.1007/s13592-011-0016-x (about DOIs).