Dr. Peter McKenna:

When we move from the population to the particular, which is what we are doing here and which is what has fuelled the entire controversy, we are looking at a very different thing from screening. My calculation would be that for a woman in Ireland, her chance of dying of cervical cancer is 150. If the woman is in the screening programme, the chances go out to about one in 10,000, and there is a smear error causing that one. We are looking at a very select population. I am not sure what the experience is internationally in looking at these failures. It is an entirely different sort of thing to do than looking at population-based statistics.