State Sues Lab Over Pap Smear Errors

State health officials filed suit Thursday against operators of a Tarzana medical laboratory, seeking more than $3 million in damages and a court order requiring the firm to offer free re-analysis of millions of Pap smears they diagnosed during the past five years.

The Los Angeles Superior Court suit names six defendants, including Central Diagnostic Laboratory and Central Pathology Services Medical Group, the state’s largest Pap smear lab until its closure last month after state inspectors found that it had misdiagnosed 21% of a randomly selected group of 1,103 smears.

A lawyer for the state said the complaint, filed on behalf of state Health Services Director Kenneth Kizer, is an attempt to enforce the state’s demand that the companies notify all clients of the past five years of their willingness to pay for reanalysis of Pap smears, used to detect cervical cancer and other medical abnormalities in women. Before closing in April at the state’s request, Central Pathology processed nearly 700,000 Pap smears a year, more than half of those taken in Southern California.

A spokesman for the defendants, Martin Cooper, said Thursday night that he could not respond in detail because he had not read the suit. But, Cooper said, the state had “unnecessarily filed a lawsuit, spending taxpayers’ money, in an attempt to accomplish that which we are already willing to do.”