The Guardian today published a short news item Many animal tests are badly flawed, say scientists. This news item was based on a paper in this week’s British Medical Journal, and the subject of a BMJ press release.

I thought it looked very familiar. I checked, and it seems this is research published as a report on the University of Birmingham website six months ago. I thought its conclusions were a bit dodgy then and I blogged it here.

This is just the same research redrafted for the BMJ. If at first you don’t succeed in getting publicity, just redraft your paper and get it published in a different place. If you’re lucky you might then get the national newspapers interested in a story based on an exaggeration that is six months old anyway.

Rather than bury this as a comment on an old blog entry I thought I’d follow their example and do a new one to put it right at the top.