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Dublin: 11 °C Sunday 19 May, 2013

Man suing NHS trust for ‘failure to diagnose penis cancer’

A roofer says doctors should have diagnosed his condition while they were treating him for injuries received at work.

Image: Sean Dempsey/PA Wire

A LONDON MAN is suing the city’s local NHS trust for over €350,000 after alleging that its doctors failed to diagnose cancer in his penis.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Boguslaw Faber, 50, was treated by doctors after sustaining significant injuries when he had an accident at work.

The roofer, originally from Poland and now living in Aldgate, had fallen and badly injured himself when he fell onto a sharp pole.

Faber alleges that while he was being treated, doctors misread a biopsy and suggested that he was suffering from a skin condition rather than the rare disease, which affects one of every 100,000 men.

In papers file at the High Court in London, Faber says the disease was allowed to spread for months as a result, leading him to ultimately require surgery to remove part of his genitals before they could be reconstructed.

He says a timely diagnosis could have avoided this painful surgery, and also the need to undergo other operations on his legs and to have his thyroid removed.

Faber says the incidents have caused him to suffer post-traumatic stress order, depression and other psychological injuries, and that his earning power is now virtually non-existent.

Penile cancer accounts for around 0.2 per cent of all cancers, and around 1 in 1,000 cases of male cancer mortality in the western world. Diagnosis rates for the condition are higher in Africa, however.

Read more on the case in the Daily Telegraph >

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