They can all get you into the BMJ and the Friday papers

On 4 October 2002, women who were moderate drinkers received good news: their risk of breast cancer was not raised, according to a report in the Lancet that was widely covered by the British media.1 The bad news was that smoking at an early age was now implicated as a risk factor for breast cancer. However, after they had enjoyed guilt-free drinks (without cigarettes) for only a few days, on 13 November the message was reversed: alcohol did increase the risk of breast cancer after all, but smoking was declared innocent.2 The press release proclaimed “Alcohol, tobacco and breast cancer: the definitive answer.” A reader was driven to complain in the letters page of the Guardian (14 November 2002): “So let me get this right—alcohol's no good anymore, and if you smoked within five years of getting your periods, that's bad news too. Oh no, that was a couple of weeks ago; smoking's okay now … Do things stop being bad for us if we just forget about them for a bit, do you think?”

This is a familiar story—so much so that in Bristol we set our medical students the exercise of examining the “health scare of the week” that appears each Friday, generally from a study reported in the BMJ or Lancet.^w1