The British Medical Journal’s September 27th issue is dedicated to the theme of communicating risk, exploring the challenges of combining patient-empowerment with evidence-based medicine when the doctors themselves struggle to make sense of the numbers. As one of the writers asks, “Can you explain why a test with 95% sensitivity [ie ability to detect disease in someone who has the disease] might identify only 1% of affected people in the general population?” before offering a pictoral explanation of the measures used to interpret the meaning of a positive or negative test. In another interesting article, the relationship between risk and public perception of risk is explored, with a slant on it – the risk perception is not to oneself, but to children, and the examples used are those of vaccination, BSE (this is a UK publication, after all), and road accidents. Not surprisingly, controversy influences perception of risk. A doctor turned medical journalist describes his own struggles against the journalistic cultural urge not to let detail stand in the way of a good story. And the Internet receives the usual wistful mixed review.