Court Filings Tell of Botched Results and Lab Costs

In May, we learned that about a third of the C8 test results from the C8 Health Project were botched. Court documents filed last week in Wood County tell the details of how it happened.

Status reports filed by Brookmar and Exygen, the laboratory that performed the testing, explain that the lab conducted 71,339 samples for C8 from August 2005 to August 2006, nearly 68,000 of those were part of the C8 Health Project. But, in November of 2005 it was noticed that the lab results from Exygen were consistently higher than observed at a comparative lab. Further investigation revealed that the results were biased 25 percent high.

It was later determined that the cause of the bad results had to do with the standard preparations used to calibrate the testing equipment. In this case, rabbit blood was mixed up with a known quantity of C8 and all the human samples were compared to that standard.

Exygen has committed to retesting the samples in question, all 25,233 of them, at no additional cost. In all, more than $31.6 million of the $70 million Health Project budget was spent on lab fees. Payments to participants came to roughly $27.3 million.