Health authority loses cervical smear appeal

East Kent Health Authority last week lost its appeal against a High Court ruling that three women who developed adenocarcinoma and had to have hysterectomies after results of smears had been treated as negative were victims of medical negligence.

The Department of Health supported the appeal—estimated to have cost £500000 ($800000) —because of fears that the original judgment, if allowed to stand, could threaten the national cervical screening programme by demanding unattainable standards of accuracy. But the appeal court judges clearly thought this view was unnecessarily alarmist Lord Woolf, master of the rolls, said: “The [health] authority is concerned …