The level of trust between Newfoundland and Labrador's largest health authority and the provincial government began to fall apart in the days after reports emerged that Eastern Health had deliberately withheld information about erroneous breast cancer tests, a judicial inquiry has been told.

The Cameron inquiry was also told on Tuesday, once again, that officials in the Department of Health and Community Services missed the significance of media reports in December 2006 that Eastern Health was not telling all it knew about hundreds of flawed tests.

CBC News reported in May 2007 on court documents that showed Eastern Health knew the error rate of hormone receptor tests was several times higher than what officials had suggested in a December 2006 media briefing.

The revelation touched off a political firestorm and led government to appoint Justice Margaret Cameron to hold an inquiry into what went wrong with the tests and how Eastern Health communicated with its patients and the public.

Tansy Mundon, director of communications with the Department of Health and Community Services, told Cameron Tuesday that she was deeply disturbed to have learned that Eastern Health had chosen to hold back information about the tests, which are used to help guide patient treatment.

"Certainly by this time, the level of trust was deteriorating," Mundon told Cameron, describing how the government directed Eastern Health to brief reporters again on all that it knew about hundreds of inaccurate estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor tests.

The tests help determine whether a patient is a candidate for the potentially lifesaving antihormonal therapy Tamoxifen.

Unlike before, when the government sat by the sidelines as Eastern Health briefed journalists, the Health Department kept a steady eye on Eastern Health, Mundon testified, because of a severe lack of trust.

"At this point in time, I would say that the department was now micromanaging the issue, micromanaging certainly the briefing," Mundon said.

Didn't trust materials

Asked why she wanted to review everything that Eastern Health was to release to the media in the May 2007 briefing, Mundon replied: "Because I didn't have a level of trust in the materials at this point in time."

"Were you concerned that Eastern Health may not say what the department was looking to have said?" asked inquiry co-counsel Sandra Chaytor.

"Yes, I was concerned about that," Mundon replied.

Mundon said Eastern Health officials, particularly former director of strategic communications Susan Bonnell, did not tell her that the authority chose to withhold figures related to the tests.

"At no point in time from the briefing with the minister in November [2006], up until the spring of 2007, was I aware that Eastern Health did not disclose that information," Mundon said.

News reports flagged missing details

But Chaytor presented Mundon with evidence to the contrary, including one media report after another that highlighted that Eastern Health was refusing, for legal reasons, to disclose exact results that would show the rate of error.

Officials initially suggested that the error rate could be as low as 10 per cent. An affidavit registered months later with a then-pending class action lawsuit in Newfoundland Supreme Court included figures that showed the rate of error of retested samples was actually 42 per cent.

The news stories reached Mundon's department but the content did not register with her.

"I'm saying that I obviously overlooked it at the time, yes," she said. "However, I did provide the articles to other people within the department, as well."

She said the material was distributed to former health minister Tom Osborne and other senior officials.

Osborne testified this spring that he assumed that what Eastern Health officials showed to him in a November 2006 briefing would be released a few weeks later. However, Osborne did not watch, hear or read news accounts of the December briefing, and said that media summaries presented to him did not mention that Eastern Health had withheld anything.

Moreover, Osborne would not learn until May 2007 that Eastern Health had not even told him everything they already knew in the November briefing.