A heartfelt commentary came from an unexpected source at Newfoundland and Labrador's breast cancer inquiry, as a specialist who manages health databases talked about the human side of statistics.

Dr. Reza Alaghehbandan, a manager who reviewed hundreds of pathology reports over the last year and half for a Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information review on flawed lab work, told the Cameron inquiry Friday that there was much more to his work than tracking medical data.

"They were not only pathology reports to us," Alaghehbandan told Justice Margaret Cameron as he concluded testimony about how he compiled a database involving patients affected by years of erroneous hormone receptor tests.

"They were patients' lives. Stories. Husbands' and wives' stories, sisters' and mothers' [stories]," he said.

Alaghehbandan told the inquiry that he and his colleagues always tried to keep a human face on the pathology reports they reviewed on a daily basis.

"We felt the pain, the agony and the stress that the cancer diagnosis would've caused for the families and the patients and friends," he said.

Alaghehbandan also provided the inquiry — which is examining how a St. John's pathology lab came to provide inaccurate hormone test results to more than 300 patients between 1997 and 2005— with greater insight about the value of discarded machinery.

The inquiry has already been told that an old testing system manufactured by DAKO was sold years ago, and its records were likely sent to the St. John's dump.

While external reviews found that other problems, including poor training and high staff turnover, were leading problems at the Eastern Health lab, the inquiry has already been told about an information vacuum created by the loss of the equipment and its records.

"If all that data had been available to [you], might that have been of some assistance to you in your task?" inquiry co-counsel Bern Coffey asked Alaghehbandan.

"Quite valuable," he replied.

Cameron began hearing evidence in March, and is expected to conclude her hearings next week. Final witnesses include Premier Danny Williams, whose government called the inquiry in 2007 amid revelations that Eastern Health officials knew far more about flawed tests than they had publicly revealed.