In any one year one in four people in the United Kingdom have their thyroid function checked.

This grammatically erroneous and factually absurd statement from a 2009 BMJ paper remains uncorrected, as highlighted by this interesting paper about journals’ error handling in JRSM. It strikes me as alarming that the Guardian appears to have a more open and robust approach to highlighting and correcting errors than our leading medical journal; but then I guess correcting mistakes in emerging research fields is a trickier issue than correcting journalistic errors.

More irritatingly – how come other people can get such obvious slips though peer review, yet peer reviewers pick up on every dodgy comma in my work?