Dear Editor,

I read the article by Spanakis et al. I am referred in the acknowledgements for providing outbreak information data. I want you to know that I did not provide the data because I was never asked. The authors used the clinical data we had collected along with the eminent Dr Tsiodras under extremely difficult conditions, they made posters and eventually they published this article and I had never been notified by them about all this work being done. We collected the data when the rest of the gentlemen had not moved from their desks.

The acknowledgment they wrote is more than an irony directly to my face because my name should have been among the authors. They found the opportunity that I left Athens and I moved to the University of Crete in order to ignore my work. I know that you should not be interested in all these but I am very bittered by what happened and I also want to make the point that when you accept manuscripts from Greece you should always know that some good people have always been ignored.

Sincerely,

Irene Kourbeti
American Board of Internal Medicine
American Board of Infectious Disease
University of Crete - Department of Medicine