The Winton Centre are delighted that Professor Theresa Marteau, a member of the Management Board of the Centre and Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit, has been appointed a Dame of the British Empire for her services to public health.

Journalism’s standards of statistical reporting have been notoriously low. But they are improving. And it seems they might now have become better at it than the scientists who produce the numbers…

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Guest blogger Michael Blastland points out the misleading reporting of statistics in a recent article in the Guardian and discovers that this time it was not so much the journalists to blame, but the academics that wrote the paper.

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A paper published today in Occupational & Environmental Medicine was accompanied by a press release titled “Exposure to certain insecticides linked to childhood behavioural difficulties”, and which made the bold claim that “children with the highest levels of metabolites in their urine were around three times as likely to display abnormal behaviour.” But these findings are quite plausibly due …

Last week I sent a tweet of a graphic in the Daily Mail. Since it provoked a number of retweets I thought a blog on the subject would be worthwhile!

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) today launched its Go for Gold campaign, encouraging us not to burn our roast or fried vegetables and keep our oven chips at a nice golden colour. The idea is to reduce people’s intake of acrylamide, a chemical that is “created when many foods, particularly starchy foods like potatoes and bread, are cooked for long …

David appeared on Sunday Politics on the 18th December discussing how the numbers of deaths attributed to air pollution are calculated.

It's available on iPlayer until January 17th. The item starts at around 25:25.