To the Editor:
I am grateful to the authors of this letter for their continued interest in this subject over many decades, and their past support for the WHO Classification of Tumours. Governance matters, and it was quite clear that the CAC mechanism did not meet our requirements and could not continue alongside the editorial board for the reasons given in my editorial [1]. While the correspondents may find this disappointing, the new edition of the Haematolymphoid volume has been thoroughly reorganised and rewritten with the help of 420 authors and editors with multidisciplinary expertise and worldwide representation, including many members of the European Association for Haematopathology and the Society for Hematopathology, according to our published methodology [2, 3]. The Haematolymphoid Tumours volume (5th ed.) is now published online in beta format [4] and readers can judge for themselves how we’ve done, with the opportunity for feedback from our website. Personally, I am very grateful to all involved who have worked tirelessly to achieve an excellent hierarchical classification as well as a level of detailed description of these disorders that have never been bettered.
Disclaimer
The content of this article represents the personal views of the author and does not represent the views of the author’s employers and associated institutions. Where the author is identified as personnel of the International Agency for Research on Cancer/World Health Organization, the author alone is responsible for the views expressed in this article, and does not necessarily represent the decisions, policy or views of the International Agency for Research on Cancer/World Health Organization.
References
Cree IA. The WHO classification of haematolymphoid tumours. Leukemia. 2022;36:1701–2.
Cree IA, White VA, Indave BI, Lokuhetty D. Revising the WHO classification: female genital tract tumours. Histopathology. 2020;76:151–6.
https://whobluebooks.iarc.fr/about/faq/. Accessed 9 Aug 2022.
https://tumourclassification.iarc.who.int/chapters/63. Accessed 9 Aug 2022.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
IC responded to the letter to the editor by invitation, and finalised the manscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Cree, I.A. The WHO classification of haematolymphoid tumours: response to Swerdlow et al.. Leukemia 36, 2750 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41375-022-01694-y
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41375-022-01694-y