This article is from page 17 of the 2007-08-21 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 17 JPG
NOT a single patient in Clare or the mid-west, who was retested fol- lowing last June’s faulty nationwide pregnancy test kit scare, has been found to be pregnant.
The Health Service Executive Mid- West has confirmed that it has com- pleted the process of contacting all patients who were originally tested with suspect Clearview HCG preg- nancy test kits to offer them retest- ing. Some of the kits were found to give false negative results following an error in the manufacturing proc- NSE
Staff at Ennis General Hospital painstakingly trawled through three months of records to establish how many women were tested for preg- nancy between March and May so they could be contacted and offered retests. Around 200 patients are
known to have taken the test in that period in Ennis alone.
A spokeswoman for the HSE has now confirmed that on completion of those retests, “no women were found to be pregnant.”
Four out of the six main hospitals in the mid-west are known to have received kits from the faulty batch. The Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, the largest hospital in the region, contacted patients who were given the test and quickly con- firmed that all negative results de- tected with the suspect test kit were confirmed as negative on re-test.
The Regional Maternity Hospital was issued with four boxes of kits from the suspect batch but none of them were used and have since been destroyed. Management at Nenagh General Hospital also retested pa- tients and all results were con- firmed.