The High Court has dismissed A.Q.’s appeal against the refusal of her hepatitis C compensation claim, ruling that the positive screening tests she received in 1998 did not meet the statutory threshold for a claim made after 20 June 2006.
The appeal concerned a preliminary legal issue: whether positive results from an Abbott Prism chemiluminescent immunoassay, or ChLIA, counted as a positive result from an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay under the Hepatitis C Compensation Acts. The court did not decide whether A.Q. had been infected with hepatitis C or whether her ChLIA results were false positives.
A.Q. received Anti-D immunoglobulin after the birth of her second child in 1993. The batch used was later identified as potentially infectious. In January 1998, three ChLIA tests on her blood were positive, but a PCR test and later confirmatory tests at the National Virus Reference Laboratory were negative. Correspondence from the blood service referred to her test as an ELISA result; the court found that description was mistaken.
The Hepatitis C Compensation Tribunal refused her application in October 2015 because she had not established a diagnosis meeting the statutory requirements. The High Court had previously extended the time for her application and sent the matter back to the Tribunal. Her claim was made in 2008, so the 2006 amendment applied.
A.Q. argued that the law should be read to include ChLIA because it served the same purpose as ELISA and excluding it produced an unjust and retrospective result. The Minister for Health argued that the legislation deliberately limited qualifying tests to specified methods.
Justice Bernard J. Barton found that ChLIA and ELISA were both immunoassays designed to detect HCV antibodies, but they used different markers. The experts agreed that ChLIA was not an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The court also found that the blood service’s interchangeable use of the terms most likely arose from mistake or carelessness.
The judge held that the statutory wording was clear: a qualifying diagnosis under the relevant provision had to be based on a positive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The 2006 amendment was intended to restrict qualifying tests for applications made after its commencement, even where the underlying test had been carried out earlier. The court rejected the argument that this result was absurd or that a broader interpretation was justified.
The court dismissed the appeal. Its decision addressed the statutory test threshold only; it did not resolve the disputed medical question of whether A.Q. had ever been exposed to or infected with the virus.