Sigh… Milo Dysplastic? Don’t the Associated Press and Reuters have, you know, editors around on New Year’s weekend?

To flesh out the info in the news reports, myelodysplastic syndrome — MDS — describes a group of conditions in which the precursor cells in the bone marrow (stem cells of sorts) gain mutations and stop producing the child cells that make up normal blood (white cells, red cells, and platelets). MDS is preleukemic, in that the mutated stem cells don’t crowd out the normal ones, but rather function alongside them. Once that crowding-out occurs, though, that signals the evolution to actual leukemia.

(And to highlight the biggest difference between the worlds of adult and pediatric cancer: according to this summary, there are about 13,000 new diagnoses of MDS each year, and every news report has mentioned that this makes it a pretty rare condition. Alas, that’s also a good estimate of the total number of new pediatric cancer diagnoses, of all types, that are made annually.)