Dr. Tony Holohan:

Can I make some points of general clarification on the numbers and not so much around the precision? The number that is here is the number that is flagged for review. The 209 that is circulating at the moment relates to those that have been reviewed in terms of their cytology and what is called a discordance - in other words, the difference in what we say now looking backwards and what was said then has been identified. That is what that number of 209 relates to and it relates to the cohort of years. It is not just the eight years but it is all the way up to the end of last year, in effect, because there were effectively two more years worth of the screening programme operating and contributing to that number. Those numbers get done by starting with all of the incident cases it knows about. We now know it did not know about the ones the registry had or did not include those. It worked those down. The question it is effectively asking is where a person who has cervical cancer, was there some failure in the chain of screening that failed to take the opportunity to prevent this cancer from occurring? That could be because an appointment was not sent out. It could be because the person did not respond to an appointment. It could be the screening. It could be the GP service not taking an adequate smear. It could the cytology or colposcopy service after the full chain is looked at. Only those where there is a reasonable suspicion that it is the smear that needs to be looked at are flagged for review and then a subset of those are identified where there is that discordance or difference between what it said back then in the report and what it now appears to be saying. I wanted to explain that.