Despite other mechanisms of dissemination (which need not preclude later publication in more formal peer reviewed journals) even in the face of a public health emergency, authors seem tied to publishing information first in peer-reviewed journals, possibly because they may perceive readers as reluctant to take results seriously until they have successfully emerged from review by a respected journal. It seems therefore timely to ask whether journals, and others involved in publishing, are confusing the valid role of a journal as a place of scientific record with an equally valid role, that of a news outlet? In a Canadian press report [3] on the Skowronski paper, Ross Upshur, head of the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics, was quoted as saying ''Making public health policy during a pandemic based on data most people hadn't seen was far from ideal,'' adding that he believes the question of when public health priorities trump rules of scientific publication remains to be resolved: ''Putting the imprimatur of a high impact peer review journal first is I think what we need to have the discussion about.'' Of course, the authors of this paper, and of all the articles published from study of the SARS epidemic and the H1N1 pandemic, would say they were not seeking such an ''imprimatur'' for the sake of it, but because as yet there is no widely accepted alternative to the ''quality'' stamp that peer review imparts. Similarly, journal editors would maintain that highprofile papers generated by such emergencies need intense scrutiny lest the public health suffer from the premature publication of unreliable results.