By NAOMI LARKIN
Almost 1500 women will this week receive the frightening confirmation that Gisborne pathologist Dr Michael Bottrill misdiagnosed their cervical cancer tests.
Of these women, about 500 fall directly into or could not be excluded from the category of high-grade abnormalities - those facing the greatest risk. The remaining 1000 have been diagnosed as having low-grade abnormalities.
In letters to be mailed by the Health Funding Authority, a further 300 women will be told that their tests were unsatisfactory and the results could therefore not be read.
For nearly 10,000 other women the news is good - their smear results have been confirmed as normal.
The authority said most of the women should already have been contacted by their GPs and advised to seek treatment. The final figures, released in a report by the authority today, end an agonising wait for the thousands of women whose cervical smear slides have been reread by a Sydney laboratory.
The rereading of Dr Bottrill's work from January 1991 to March 1996 when he retired is part of an investigation into how the underreporting of cervical smear abnormalities by the pathologist was allowed to occur.
However, the authority stated that its rereading would not extend to 380 breast cancer histology slides originally read by Dr Bottrill.
Tracy Mellor, spokeswoman for the authority, said GPs and smear takers had already been advised about the cervical test abnormalities detected by the slide rereading.
But this was the first time the women had been contacted directly by the authority.
In addition, there were a number of women whom the authority had been unable to contact. Tracy Mellor said some of these women were in the high-grade category but she did not know how many.
The report indicates that a proportion of women with high-grade abnormalities will progress to invasive cancer if not treated. Women who have low-grade abnormalities have a small increased risk of developing cancer.
The authority has asked health professionals to refer women with high-grade and two low-grade, abnormal smears to special colposcopy clinics if they have not already had appropriate diagnosis and/or treatment. (A colposcopy is a specialised internal examination.)
Tracy Mellor was unable to say how many women had attended the clinics.
The authority was advising women with one low-grade result to have another smear if they had not had two normal smears since the low-grade abnormality result.
Women with unreadable smears were being told to have another smear, and free tests would be available to them until the end of June.
Meanwhile, a date for the start of hearings for the Gisborne cervical cancer inquiry is expected to be set this month following the appointment of a third member.
Professor Gordon Wright stepped down following a decision to move the hearings from Auckland to Gisborne.
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