Nellie makes a good point about the journal. Each has its own standards of review, and some have almost none. I mentioned this originally about it not being published in Lancet etc.

By the by while we are talking about all this, I have been having a heated discussion with the CDC for 4 years now about the value of implementing a screening protocol and guidelines here in the US for oral cancer. To put it mildly, they have shown no interest in putting any money into this despite the fact that any treating oncologist will tell you that early staging (early discovery and diagnosis) yields better end results. This is particularly true in cancers in which conventional therapies like slash, burn, and poison work well which OC definitely falls into. (They hate to see me come each year to the oral cancer work group, which I have a seat on.) So finally we have this ground breaking study published in Lancet (see the news section) with 170,000 people in it, over 10 years long, and the group that was screened for oral cancer (50%) had a 30% drop in mortality vs. the non screened group. This is finally the publication that I thought would get them off their asses. So I call the guy up 5 months after publication (June 3, 2005) and the head of everything dental at the CDC hasn't even heard of the study. I went ballistic, and it wasn't pretty. Their charter is exactly to protect the health of American via the implementation of guidelines etc.... So the guy calls me back the next day after he reads it and he says, "We've looked at it, and it has some serious flaws. First, half the screeners were not doctors." I said you have to be kidding me