AN expert on liver diseases said yesterday that only the "minimally informed" would equate the terms "jaundice" and "infective hepatitis".
Dr John Hegarty, a hepatologist at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, told the tribunal that the terms were not synonymous. Jaundice was a sign not a symptom.
Hepatitis referred to "a characteristic pattern of symptoms associated with a characteristic pattern of abnormality of liver function which has been attributed to an infectious agent", he said.
Last Friday the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, said there was nothing new n a 1976 file discovered at Pelican House in February last year, which first referred to patient X as having infective hepatitis. Mr Noonan said that in 1976 the terms were "synonymous".
On the same day, Mr Donal Devitt, assistant secretary at the Department of Health, said a notification from the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) on February 25th 1994, which indicated that patient X had jaundice, "was equal to a diagnosis of infective hepatitis".
But Dr Hegarty said the term jaundice "refers to a yellow discolouration of the skin and the eyes. It is a consequence of many disease processes, including all forms of acute and chronic liver disease and gall bladder disease". It could be "a sign of infectious hepatitis", he said.
However, he agreed with Mr Paul Gallagher, counsel for the BTSB, that a diagnosis of non A non B hepatitis in 1976/77 "would have come within the term infective or infectious hepatitis". He said that "infective hepatitis could cover hepatitis A and hepatitis, B in 1976/77", but that "sometimes people used the terms `infectious hepatitis' as referring to hepatitis A rather than hepatitis B". It was "a term used for both".