quote:


An obscure bill that sailed through Congress and was signed into law last month is stoking fears of a nationwide DNA warehouse potentially open to abuse by law enforcement agencies or health insurance companies.
...
The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007 (S.1858/H.R. 3825), signed into law on April 24, empowers a committee to provide guidelines to all states on how -- and for how long -- they should store blood. At present, all states store blood from all newborns, and some, like California, store it indefinitely. Eight of the committee's nine members are medical researchers, who almost universally favor longer storage times, so critics fear that the national guidelines will lead to more storage of samples, which contain recoverable DNA.

"What we are doing is taking an individual genetic code and saying it's the government's," said Twila Brase, of the Minnesota activist group Citizens' Council on Health Care. "And once we do that, it's available for whatever a legislature wants to do in 20 years. The fact of the matter is that we don't know what they could or would do."

quote:

ORIGINAL: Bettawrekonize

quote:


An obscure bill that sailed through Congress and was signed into law last month is stoking fears of a nationwide DNA warehouse potentially open to abuse by law enforcement agencies or health insurance companies.
...
The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007 (S.1858/H.R. 3825), signed into law on April 24, empowers a committee to provide guidelines to all states on how -- and for how long -- they should store blood. At present, all states store blood from all newborns, and some, like California, store it indefinitely. Eight of the committee's nine members are medical researchers, who almost universally favor longer storage times, so critics fear that the national guidelines will lead to more storage of samples, which contain recoverable DNA.

"What we are doing is taking an individual genetic code and saying it's the government's," said Twila Brase, of the Minnesota activist group Citizens' Council on Health Care. "And once we do that, it's available for whatever a legislature wants to do in 20 years. The fact of the matter is that we don't know what they could or would do."

LINK

I don't like the idea of the government having my DNA on file without my permission (of course a newborn is too young to contest this, but permission should be required by parents).