Human cost should not be dismissed

EDITOR—Greenhalgh and Powell's editorial assesses the economic evaluation of the multicentre aneurysm screening study (MASS), but it masks with numbers a human tragedy at the core of the story: this is a screening study that killed people. 1 2

The authors mention in passing a mortality of 6% among the 322 men who had surgery as a result of the invitation to screening. This figure represents 19 men, comparatively young at retirement age, who before receiving the invitation would have been living their lives unfettered by the knowledge that they had an aneurysm. Now they are dead.

Obviously some of these men might have died anyway from a sudden …