Two new lawsuits have been filed, each by a woman from Ireland who alleges she suffered a missed cervical cancer diagnosis.

According to an Irish Times article, two women have decided to take legal action against the Health Service Executive and certain laboratories because they have developed later stage cervical cancer as a result of a missed cervical cancer diagnosis.

Missed Cervical Cancer Diagnosis

In the past, before the advent of the Pap smear screening test, many women died each year from cervical cancer. In fact, cervical cancer at one time was one of the most common causes of death from cancer for women before the Pap smear was common.

Since that time, the death rate from cervical cancer has dropped.

Now, women are encouraged to regularly get a Pap smear test to determine if there are any abnormal cells on the cervix. If there are, it may mean that a woman should be treated for pre-cancerous conditions. These treatments may include a colposcopy (with biopsy), endocervical scraping or cone biopsies. Each of these collect samples of the cervical tissue.

If a woman gets regular Pap smears, they should be able to know early on if they are at risk for cervical cancer. However, some women are experiencing missed cervical cancer diagnoses.

In these cases, some women have blamed doctors or laboratories for negligent reading of test results. When a test that should read positive for abnormal cells is mistakenly read as normal, that woman may not know she is developing cervical cancer.

She may then wait another year or even up to three or five more years to get another test. By that time, her missed cervical cancer may have developed to the point that it is now too late to treat successfully. For seemingly healthy women under the age of 29, it is recommended that women get a Pap smear test every three years. For women over 30, it is every five years.

Irish Women File Missed Cervical Cancer Lawsuits

Before two Irish women filed missed cervical cancer lawsuits, another woman received a settlement of €2.5 million for her own missed cervical cancer. This woman had received a false negative result for a 2011 Pap smear, but later it was determined that she had a missed cervical cancer diagnosis. Later, it was found that in over 200 more cases, the test results were misread and women were given false negative results.

This settlement spurred the two most recent cases on toward the High Court.

One of these women alleges she had normal Pap smears in 2009 and 2012 but was diagnosed with cervical cancer recently. She believes her missed cervical cancer should have been caught earlier, and if so, there would have been a better prognosis for her.

This woman’s counsel, according to Irish Times, said that “a review of the smear tests was carried out in 2014 and 2015 but the woman was not informed of the review, or of the review results which showed the original tests results were incorrect.”

Filing a Missed Cervical Cancer Lawsuit

If you believe your Pap smear test was misread and that you may have been given a false negative result, you may benefit from speaking to an experienced attorney. Legal compensation can help offset costs of medical expenses, hospital stays, missed work, pain and suffering, and wrongful death.