The comments of Lloyd et al. on our paper (1) can be summarized as follows: (1) It is claimed that the beagle data used in our study (1) are not up-to-date, and (2) it is argued that the comparison in ref. (1) of the beagle and dial painter modeling is flawed because osteosarcomas in beagles are compared with all bone cancers found in the dial painters. Contrary to what is suggested in the first paragraph of the letter of Lloyd et al., we do not agree with these comments. These two issues are addressed below.
First, it should be noted that ref. (1) is a follow-up paper to an earlier study (2) and that both papers are concerned mainly with the comparison of two beagle data sets. The results that were obtained for the Utah/ITRI/ LRRI beagles are confirmed in...