If you’re guessing that the correct answer to the title question is ‘nothing’ then congratulations, you have the correct answer but please permit me to elaborate a little further. At the beginning of May I wrote about David Stevens, a Leatherhead-based quack who trades under the names Vital […]

Only yesterday I noticed this rather curious report in the Press Gazette… A solicitor failed in an attempt to sue a political blogger for defamation and malicious falsehood when a judge decided that the words of which he complained could not be held to refer to him. The […]

A subject I’ve been meaning to tackle for a while, but never quite got around to, is that of The Great Rape Joke Controversy™, which flared up on Twitter (again!) the other day – and if you missed the action then I’d heartily recommend that you read Ally […]

According to the Guardian, things don’t seem to going too well for Michael Gove’s flagship free schools programme in Suffolk: There are around 10,600 empty school places in Suffolk. Or, to put it another way, if 10 average-sized secondary schools were closed down, there would still be a […]

A couple of days ago I received an email from Carl Gardner, who blogs at Head of Legal, in which he asked whether I had been contacted by Liz Watson and asked to remove from the Ministry all reference to her and to her involvement in the case […]

Since the publication of the Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer’s meta-analysis of Aborton-Breast Cancer (ABC) studies in 2004 – Beral et al. (2004) [1] – two further large prospective studies have been published, neither of which found that induced abortion was associated with an increase […]

From the file marked ‘Misleading Headlines’ the Press Association (as churned by MSN UK news) reports: 400 abortions ‘without sign-offs’ More than 400 abortions were carried out last year without the right information being submitted to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), official figures have shown. Doctors also failed […]

In part 3 I looked in detail at Brind et al. (1996) [1], the key meta-analysis on which the Abortion-Breast Cancer Hypothesis is founded and foudn that Brind’s claim to have demonstrated a causal link between abortion and breast cancer is, to say the least, extremely questionable. This […]

To quickly recap: In part one, I looked at the provenance of the Abortion-Breast Cancer (ABC) hypothesis, noting that it is not supported by any of the major cancer research/prevention organisations in either the US or UK, including the US National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society and Cancer […]