Dr. Gabriel Scally:

Even the way in which the reviews that CervicalCheck asked for, which resulted in all the information that has been so contentious, was deficient as well because they left it very much to the laboratories themselves to decide how to review those slides, so we are entirely dependent on how they conducted that. I tried to explain as best I could the problem of review bias. If a very experienced cytologist is presented with a slide to look at from someone they know has got cervical cancer, he or she will spend a lot more time and attention to it and find more things than would be found by a cervical screener looking at the slide within a fixed time span within a whole batch of slides. If one subjects slides to that degree of scrutiny one would almost inevitably end up with more abnormalities detected. I will let Dr. Denton deal with that. It is really difficult then to go back and review what happened under exactly the same circumstances.

The RCOG review is as close as we are going to get to that fully objective analysis of the slides. It may yet take some time and they may not get permission from all of the women to look at their slides.