There are times when the ingenuity of these scientist types just takes your breath away. Not only do they do all these massively clever things to invent drugs and keep us healthy, they also make up really neat acronyms. This week’s top prize for making meaning match form goes to a group of Australian medical researchers. They are going to be using azithromycin (generic name), one of the macrolide antibiotics, to see whether it can help those who suffer from asthma breathe more easily. With major funding made available, this will be the largest study of its type into asthma the world has ever seen. The hypothesis under test is not quite what you might expect. Under normal circumstances, doctors use an antibiotic to treat a bacterial infection. So long as the doctor matches the antibiotic to the susceptible strain of bacteria causing the infection, you get better. But rather than aim at any infection as the cause of, or an aggravating feature in, asthma, the doctors are hoping that zithromax will reduce the inflammation in the lungs and so ease the breathing. This takes us into very tricky waters of cause and effect because often the cause of the inflammation is an infection. However, there has already been a short preliminary study and the results have been encouraging. This is now a full-scale test in five centres located in three major cities in Australia. The problem with this approach is that only about 50% of asthma suffers have elevated levels of eosinophils and so respond to the treatment. If the use of zithromax treats both groups with “normal” and increased levels of eosinophils, zithromax will be accepted as the better general treatment.