NZ: "Unfortunate Experiment" Memorial Missing

From the NZ Herald:

Women's health campaigners were horrified this week to discover that a plaque commemorating two of the whistle-blowers on the "unfortunate experiment" at National Women's Hospital has removed.

Thursday was the 22nd anniversary of the public release of the Cartwright Report on the inquiry into Dr Herbert Green's unethical study at the Auckland hospital into carcinoma of the cervix.

An Otago University study published in June found a 10-fold higher rate of cancer among women initially managed with small diagnostic biopsies during the study period, than among women given treatments intended to cure them.

To mark the anniversary, as they do every year, a small group of women gathered outside the former National Women's Hospital building in Epsom on Thursday to remember the women harmed by the study - and those harmed by the cervical screening failure in Gisborne in the 1990s.

They went to pay their respects at the plaque, at the other side of the building, which commemorates the work of two of the doctors who spoke out against the study, Jock McLean and Bill McIndoe.

The metal plaque, mounted on concrete, was placed by the Women's Health Action Trust in 1993.