RUTH’S CANCER NOT LINKED TO FALSE NEGATIVES, CLAIMS LAB
A LABORATORY has claimed that Ruth Morrissey’s cervical cancer was not caused by or connected to the evidence revealed in the smear tests of 2009 and 2012, the High Court has heard.
Ms Morrissey, a mother of one from Monaleen, Co. Limerick, has sued for damages for alleged negligence and breach of duty by the HSE and the two labs which she says wrongly analysed her routine smear tests in 2009 and 2012.
Her counsel, Jeremy Maher said US-based Quest Diagnostics was now claiming that evidence from its 2009 slide bore no relation to the cancer with which she was diagnosed in 2014.
He said this claim had never been made before, and that the case should not proceed as scheduled on Tuesday, as Ms Morrissey, 37, needed time for her experts to examine the histopathology evidence taken from her tissue samples, as Quest had done.
He said cytopathologist Dr Marshall Austin had reported for Quest that when cytology (cell analysis) from the 2009 slide was compared to tissue specimens taken from Ms Morrissey in 2014, there was ‘no correlation between the two’. ‘In other words, [he says] you cannot say there is any causal link between the smear of 2009 and the cancer of 2014,’ Mr Maher summarised.
And Mr Maher said her experts also needed time to ‘blind test’ her CervicalCheck smear tests as had been done by both Quest and Medlab, the second, Dublin-based laboratory involved in the case with regard to a 2012 smear. He explained that markers [signifiers of disease] were placed by technicians on the original slides during the CervicalCheck audit carried out in 2014. A blind test was when the slides were examined when these markers were removed, which Ms Morrissey’s experts had not done.
Both laboratories opposed Ms Morrissey’s application for an adjournment, arguing that Ms Morrissey had known since July about the blind-testing and the histology investigations being carried out. Emily Egan SC, for Quest said the lab had been unable to give a more detailed defence at an earlier stage, due to the speed with which the case reached court, given Ms Morrisey’s terminal prognosis.
Imogen McGrath BL, for Medlab, said the plaintiff had had the slides for longer than either of the laboratories.
Just before the court vacation, the court had been told that her tumour had reduced, and that a pelvic CT scan offered hope to Ms Morrissey, who had been told that her condition was terminal. Judge Anthony Barr, who was hearing emergency cases over the court vacation, said it was for Judge Kevin Cross, who had begun hearing Mrs Morrissey’s case in July, to decide on Tuesday whether it would be adjourned to allow Ms Morrissey’s experts to counter the claims.
‘We need time to look at this claim’