A note on the CDF high-p_t charged particle excess

It has recently been pointed out that CDF data for the cross section of high-p_t charged particles show an excess of up to three orders of magnitude over QCD predictions, a feature tentatively ascribed to possible violations of factorisation. We observe that for p_t > 80 GeV the measured charged-particle cross sections become of the same order as jet cross sections. Combining this information with data on charged particle distributions within jets allows us to rule out the hypothesis that the CDF data could be interpreted in terms of QCD factorisation violation. We also comment on the difficulty of interpreting the excess in terms of new physics scenarios.