Tekapo finding
After a coronial inquiry, Donna Chisholm updates her 2015 story.
Acoroner has changed the official cause of death of a South Auckland woman, but rejected allegations by a drug-company owner that she was involved in an unapproved clinical trial.
The Listener reported in
2015 that the Solicitor-General had ordered the coroner to open an inquiry into the 2004 death of Ngamata Tekapo after investigations by Lance Gravatt questioned whether it was linked to her use of benzbromarone, a treatment for severe gout linked with liver toxicity. Gravatt’s company sells a rival product.
A coroner had initially accepted a pathologist’s report that Tekapo died of chronic renal disease, secondary to gout, and likely alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver. But in a new investigation, completed in January, coroner Peter Ryan preferred the findings of a second pathologist, who said a major haemorrhage from an ulcerated uric-acid deposit on her foot caused her death. The chronic renal disease in association with cirrhosis was a secondary cause.
Ryan said it was possible benzbromarone might have contributed to Tekapo’s death in a way not yet recognised by medical science, but he believed it was unlikely.
Tekapo’s case was one of a series reported by Counties Manukau District Health
Board doctors in the New Zealand Medical Journal for a study on the safety of benzbromarone. The DHB conceded to the coroner that the journal article might not have said clearly enough that the “study” was a retrospective audit of charts that didn’t need ethics approval. The coroner accepted the use of benzbromarone was clinically appropriate and not experimental.
Gravatt says he’s pleased that finally there has been a thorough inquiry into Tekapo’s death, commenting that the first coroner didn’t have all the medical facts available to him. He’s also pleased the liver toxicity risks of benzbromarone were noted in the findings.
The second reopened case we referred to in the 2015 story, that of Auckland plasterer Eddie Tavinor, who was decapitated when part of a driveshaft from an oncoming truck hurtled through his windscreen on the Southern Motorway in Auckland in November 2000, is still before the coroner. A hearing date is yet to be set.