TY - JOUR T1 - Atoms JF - Archives of Disease in Childhood JO - Arch Dis Child SP - 227 LP - 227 DO - 10.1136/adc.86.4.227-a VL - 86 IS - 4 AU - Harvey Marcovitch Y1 - 2002/04/01 UR - http://adc.bmj.com/content/86/4/227.2.abstract N2 - It is a cardinal journalistic rule to bury apologies below the fold on page 94. We are breaking the rule to say sorry to authors and an editorialist, for whom we caused confusion and inaccuracy, when commenting on details of cardiac surgery at the hospital of the former.1,2 Please see page 313 for the correction. Newspapers, at least in the UK, love a good scare story. For the last few months they have done their best to demonise MMR vaccine—but once the fuss dies down it may be back to normal with food allergy. If you ask the average reader (or supermarket shopper) if severe food allergy is common, the answer is likely to be “Yes”. So, as an average reader of ADC how many children do you think die in the UK each year from food allergy: 1000? 10? 100? To find out if you are right take a look at Macdougall and colleagues' paper which has attempted to … ER -