KEY POINTS:
A group of eight Herceptin campaigners is filing for a judicial review of how Pharmac decided not to fund Herceptin for full-year courses for early-stage breast cancer sufferers.
Medical experts at the state drug-buying agency met this week to decide whether it will fund a nine-week programme using the drug, an expensive medication which treats the aggressive Her2-positive type of breast cancer. Pharmac is expected to disclose that decision next week.
Although Herceptin is subsidised for women with late-stage Her2-positive cancer -- a type of breast cancer which makes up nearly a third of cases and occurs in people with a particular genetic susceptibility -- Pharmac has declined funding the drug for women in the early stages of the disease.
Women with early-stage Her2-positive cancer have access to funded Herceptin in 23 out of 28 OECD nations. In New Zealand about 320 women suffer from Her2 positive breast cancer, and about 40 women are paying for Herceptin treatment themselves.
One of them is Horowhenua woman Chris Walsh, who is spending around $90,000 for her course of Herceptin, and is one of eight women involved in the new legal action.
"I have instructed lawyers on behalf of the other women to proceed with a case for a judicial review," Ms Walsh today told Radio New Zealand.
"We're between a rock and a hard place ... we've done everything that we can and this is our last resort".
She has so far had nine of the 17 treatments in a year-long Herceptin course and earlier this year unsuccessfully went to the Human Rights Commission in a bid to get her money refunded.
Ms Walsh said the women involved in the legal challenge were aged from 40 years to 60, lived in four different areas of the North Island and one woman had had two Herceptin treatments and another had received 12.
Ms Walsh said she met the Human Rights Commission on March 15 to complain about perceived discrimination by Pharmac, but was told Pharmac had not discriminated against women who wanted the 12-month course subsidised.
"Domestic law doesn't really provide for the right to the highest attainable standard of health," she said.
The commission told her there could be scope for a judicial review of the way Pharmac made its decisions.
The eight women were not eligible for the nine-week Herceptin course for which subsidies were expected to be announced next week, and would challenge Pharmac's decision-making processes, she said.
"They're almost paralysed by their own bureaucracy," she said.
- NZPA
