Carl Heneghan

And often that's enough for people to then go, yeah, let's go and screen.

But actually, you've got to consider all of the evidence, and particularly what you said about the absolute effects, incredibly important.

paper do we have anything to say about the the screening implications of this did your maths help you uh decide what to do well so what happens is you did right the papers come out there's lots of emotive and then what happens is we only see the absolute numbers and people have seen these pictograms of a thousand people and they've done it for the american trials but they tend to only do that when the decision has been made

And then you're trying to inform the public.

Oh, if you come for this screening test, here's what you might consider might happen to you.

What I'm saying is it has to come right up front and it has to be done really well so people right at the outset can get their head around what the issues are.

And I don't think my job is to say people what they should and shouldn't do, because as a society, we will have decisions about how we want to spend our money.

But the key is, if you want to spend it in this way, you should understand these effects.

But you should also understand what if you spent a billion pounds, for instance, on reducing smoking and reducing the high risk population?

Should you put your money there?

So you have to understand this and you have to understand the alternatives to arrive at a policy decision of what to do.

I am.

Thank you very much.

So I'm not getting that angry.

But the thing as well that comes with this is it's always worse in the abstract.

And the abstract is what's freely available.

It's on PubMed.

It's what people see first.

Generally, people will not go in the back of the paper into the tables to pull out important issues like the total mortality.

And I think that's incredibly important.