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Up to 55 New Zealand women may have been exposed to an apparent deliberate attempt to infect them with a potentially fatal virus at a Melbourne abortion clinic.
The Ministry of Health is helping Australian health authorities to trace 55 New Zealand women who visited the private clinic between early 2006 and late last year.
Forty-four Australian patients of the clinic have tested positive for the virus, hepatitis C, and about half of them have had their infection linked with the clinic.
Victorian health officials are trying to contact 3500 women treated at the clinic during the four-year period.
Australian media are reporting that the women may have been infected deliberately.
Police and health authorities are investigating infections among women who were patients at Croydon Day Surgery when a now-suspended anaesthetist, Dr James Latham Peters, worked there.
Victoria's Health Minister, Daniel Andrews, said, "It's difficult to know what went on in that clinic.
"I believe this is not about system failure. This is about, it would seem, the appalling, totally inappropriate behaviour of one particular person."
The state's chief health officer, Dr John Carnie, commenting on suspicions that patients were deliberately infected, said: "It becomes more and more difficult to explain this by any other, by an accidental means."
Victorian police say they are investigating to see whether "any criminal activity led to the spread of hepatitis C to patients at the facility".
Dr Peters had hepatitis C. His strain of the virus matches the strain in at least 22 of the patients.
The Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria suspended him in February.
Melbourne's Herald Sun reported that he was sentenced to a six-month suspended jail term in 1996 after pleading guilty to 20 charges relating to providing his wife with a two-year supply of the painkiller pethidine.
This year, he was sentenced for possessing pornographic images of children.
The medical board placed him on a programme for substance-abusing doctors, made him submit to drug tests for a year, and restricted his practice, but the conditions were later removed.
The Health Ministry's deputy director of public health, Dr Fran McGrath, said Victoria's Department of Health had sought help in tracing 55 patients who had given New Zealand addresses to the clinic.
"Based on the results of women tested, approximately 5 per cent of women treated at the clinic may have contracted hepatitis C," Dr McGrath said. "We estimate that up to three New Zealand women may test positive."
The ministry is urging the affected New Zealand patients to call Healthline. By last night several women had done so, a spokesman said.
Healthline - 0800 611 116
HEPATITIS C
* A virus that causes liver inflammation.
* Spread by blood-to-blood contact.
* Minor symptoms at first for most.
* 30 per cent clear the virus from their bodies.
* The rest become long-term carriers.
* Of these, up to 20 per cent may develop liver scarring, and 5 per cent may develop liver cancer.
* Anti-viral treatment works long-term for up to 60 per cent, depending on the strain of virus.
