Carl Heneghan

So there was a sort of caveat in the responses that I think is worth reading, which I think is that there is a dilemma when you're doing these rapid recommendations

There will always be a notion that people with expertise and experience will come in and say, hey, there's other bits of evidence that inform the issues.

And I think it's our responsibility to respond.

I think that's what we should do more of.

I thought that was interesting.

But also, tell me about this.

I'm very wary of downloading things these days onto my phone.

But it says you can download the magic app.

What's that all about?

And should we do that as clinicians?

And will it help us?

Yeah, so look, last week in JAMA, there was a publication that hit the media, widespread media, about the risk of ovarian cancer with the use of talcum powder.

And the paper used data from four cohorts of about 250,000 women, and they reported that there was no statistically significant association between the use of talcum powder in the genital area and ovarian cancer.

And what happened then, which is interesting to me, is the media reporting picked that up, and the way it's reported is really interesting.

Big study finds no strong sign linking baby powder and cancer, reports the Washington Times.

The truth about talcum powder and cancer, the Telegraph, and over 120 news outlets ran the story, which basically their main was there's no link between talc and ovarian cancer.

Well, what's interesting about this is, first to say, in the background, why this is important, talcum powder is, particularly in America, was mined in the same places where they've mined asbestos, and you get micro-deposits in talcum powder.

They tried to have some voluntary removal of that in the 70s, but globally, there's still this issue about micro-deposits of asbestos in talcum powder, and there's been many lawsuits and issues and

controversies over talc and cancer so there are quite a lot of studies but the thing that was interesting to me about this was taking this and looking at at the what the evidence is out there and and what you find is that actually if you produce a review or a paper and it hits the media you can always find out that there's other studies that can help you understand the evidence and there's previous systematic reviews in 2016 there was a systematic review

that said there's a third increased risk in ovarian cancer with the use of talc.