Infectious diseases in Portuguese

The fifteenth entry is transmitido por vetores, and Portuguese says it the only way it can, with a participle and a preposition. English has a suffix instead. « -borne » attaches to whatever carries the disease and makes a single adjective out of the whole idea: « vector-borne », « waterborne », « airborne », « foodborne », « bloodborne », « mosquito-borne », « tick-borne ». The piece doing the work is the old past participle of « bear » in its first sense, to carry, and that is where the trap lies. « Bear » has two past participles and they are not free variants. « Borne » belongs to carrying and to enduring: the costs were borne by the hospital, she has borne the delay well, and every compound in the list above. « Born » belongs to birth and to nothing else: he was born in Porto. One verb, one history, two spellings held apart by sense rather than by sound, since speech gives no clue at all. A writer who puts « water-born » in a report has said that the water gave birth to the disease, which is nearly a different theory of medicine.