Jeremy Hunt told the Commons that almost half a million women had not been sent invitations to screening RUI VIEIRA/PA WIREHundreds of thousands of women were needlessly terrified over a non-existent computer blunder in the NHS breast screening programme, a review has concluded. Ministers have apologised for the “distress and suffering” that arose out of the government’s failure to understand its own policy on inviting women for checks, which was accidentally changed five years ago without anyone noticing. Jeremy Hunt, then health secretary, announced in the Commons in May that up to 270 women may have died as a result of a decade-long computer glitch that meant almost half a million were not sent invitations for breast cancer screening. An independent review has now concluded that almost every aspect of this information was wrong. There was no computer error and the confusion stemmed instead from…

Source: The Times December 13, 2018 17:03 UTC