Newfoundland Injury Law Blog

Class Action Prepares for Trial as Breast Cancer Inquiry Revelations Resume

When testimony at the Commission of Inquiry into Hormone Receptor Testing resumed in September after an August break, it heard testimony from pathologist Dr. Ford Elms that he had retested a case before the suspension of ER/PR testing and found false negative results.  The case which caused lab officials to suspend testing in 2005 – the Peggy Deane case – came after pathologists had found other false negative results but taken no steps to report them.  Dr. Elms said he did not recall reporting the test conversion to authorities or discussing the case with other pathologists, or filing an adverse event report.

It was Dr. Elms who was asked to conduct a retest of Peggy Deane’s results.  Ms. Deane is considered to be the index case that caused the suspension of testing and retesting of hormone receptor status at Mount Sinai.

It’s pretty clear that Eastern Health was ill-positioned to recognize problems with the testing because the reading of ER/PR test results was distributed to a large number of pathologists.  Since no one pathologist did a large volume of test readings, pathologists were not likely to recognize patterns of unreliable testing.  To compound the problem, there was no requirement or expectation of “early warning” reporting of cases where retesting was conducted and came up with a different result.  With more attention to safety, the whole testing fiasco should have been caught and arrested much earlier, with fewer patients injured.

And oh yes, in August Eastern Health announced that the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information had found another ten breast cancer patients who had been missed during the review to determine treatment options.  Three of these patients had changed results.  Of the ten, six are deceased.  The Centre for Health Information was created by the provincial government to create a new patient database, owing to the unreliability of Eastern Health’s database. 

The Telegram does good reporting of current developments and keeps an archive – www.thetelegram.com.  The Cameron Commission also has an excellent website with transcripts, documents, a witness schedule, and simultaneous webcasting – www.cihrt.nl.ca.  The hearings are broadcast each day on Channel 9 starting at 1 PM and ending usually around 7 PM.

We will start to hear from the oncologists like Dr. Kara Laing next week, and it will be interesting to learn what they thought of the quality and reliability of the testing results they were getting back from the pathology lab, prior to suspension of testing.

While the revelations from the Inquiry continue to unfold, we as class counsel to the members of the Breast Cancer Testing Class Action are preparing the case for selected trials and for settlement.  This has involved us in reviewing with the assistance of experts in pathology, a significant number of patient cases.  From this we plan to select a manageable number of test cases for presentation to the case management judge, Justice Thompson.

We have a meeting on Monday, September 8th with Justice Thompson, to establish the dates for the test trials.  The trials may not be possible before January or February 2009.  The Commission of Inquiry is required to report by February 2009.

Labels: Cameron Commission; breast cancer testing