US smear test analysis ‘of highest standard’

FEARS that the outsourcing of cervical smear tests for analysis in the United States may have caused some abnormal tests to slip through the net were dismissed yesterday by the Health Service Executive (HSE).

The Dublin Well Woman Centre claimed that outsourcing tests for analysis to a private laboratory in the US to clear a massive backlog earlier this year had created a new set of problems because the method of reporting results in America differed substantially to the one used in Ireland.

Well Woman chief executive Alison Begas said that sometimes the categorisation of the result in America did not exactly translate into the British one, which was what doctors in Ireland were used to looking at.