Numbers climbing in breast cancer suit: lawyer

Almost 200 people have signed on to a class action suit over faulty breast cancer tests, a St. John's lawyer saidMonday.

Ches Crosbie, who is seeking standing at a judicial inquiry that will examine inaccurate hormone receptor tests at a pathology lab in St. John's, said the number of people in the class action suit has grown dramatically.

Crosbie said 197 individuals have registered with his firm, and in that group are patients who had 89 false negatives.

If Justice Margaret Cameron grants standing to Crosbie, he will have the right to ask questions of witnesses on behalf of the patients he is representing.

Crosbie is also asking to be financially compensated by the provincial government for the time he would spend at the commission.

The Newfoundland Supreme Court has already certified Crosbie's application for the suit.

Court documents filed with the class action suit— including an affidavit that showed the Eastern Health authority was aware the error rate of breast cancer testing was several times higher than it had publicly acknowledged— helped fuel an uproar that led the provincial government to call the judicial inquiry this spring.

Cameron, a provincial appeals court judge, is expected to start hearing testimony in January on the issue.

A key focus will be how mistakes were made in the lab, in which more than 300 patients received inaccurate results of hormone receptor tests.

Those tests are used to determine whether a woman is a candidate for the anti-hormonal drug Tamoxifen, which has been clinically shown to improve a patient's survival chances.

Cameron said she will give Crosbie— as well as the Canadian Cancer Society— a decision in writing on applications for standing.

Crosbie said almost three dozen of the people who have signed on are family members of patients who died after their laboratory tests were completed.

Meanwhile, the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association was granted standing at the inquiry on Monday.

Executive director Robert Ritter argued that his group also be given the right to ask questions.

"The kind of thing that happened with laboratory diagnostics could happen with other sectors as areas, as well, so I think the review of how the system works and where there may be some elevated risks is worth examining and is worth having some discussion about," Ritter said.