A second US company has been selected to analyse and report on smear tests taken from women here as part of the national cervical cancer screening programme.
When the screening began in September 2008, US firm Quest Diagnostics won the tender to analyse 300,000 Irish smear tests a year for the first two years of the programme.
The National Cancer Screening Service tendered for the service again recently and yesterday it announced that it had selected two US- based companies to analyse smears from August 2010.
It named Clinical Pathology Laboratories (CPL) as “the preferred bidder for the provision of cytology laboratory services for CervicalCheck”, and said its contract with Quest Diagnostics would also be extended for two years.
The National Cancer Screening Service could not say at this stage if the work would be split evenly between the two companies or if any Irish hospital laboratories had tendered for the service.