to ask...
Does this scare you? 'Cuz it scares the britches off of me!
Am I the only one who thinks this is creepy?
Read the full text on S.1858 here.
It's already law.
How did that happen? Where was the general public? Am I overreacting?
(Common sense warning: I want to add that I do not regularly read any of the blogs that I linked but found their explanations when googling this bill. I cannot recommend them for regular reading and saw some offensive comments/ ads on a couple of them. Read with caution.)
I do not consider myself either a Democrat or a Republican so I have no political agenda here but can't help but feel kind of freaked out about this bill. It passed the House, the Senate and the President's desk. Why do I still feel afraid? Certainly someone out there would have objected had it not been a good idea.
If there is anyone out there who can tell me that this law has been revised to include parental consent, a voluntary clause to the mandatory testing/storing of DNA in the proverbial warehouse, please speak up so I can sleep better tonight.
Oh, my gosh! How did that pass the general public? That's scary.
Posted by: KC | Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 08:50 PM
What scares me is that I don't think our government has the potential to do anything with this, except to really screw something up.
Posted by: Barbara | Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 08:37 AM
Rebecca,
FYI -- I just wrote to my congressman. After reading the bill, I really want to know what the intent is -- it can't possibly be what it looks to be? Our president IS still pro-life, right?
Posted by: Barbara | Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 08:49 AM
I can tell you that the Junk Food Science site really misrepresents what happened in Minnesota. Certainly this is an issue that people should be aware of, talking about, and talking to their congressional representatives about.
In Minnesota:
1. Parents can opt out of the program and have the blood spots destroyed immediately after any newborn testing in the hospital.
2. Personal information is not stored with the blood spots (that's what really being stored, not the scary sounding "DNA material"). When the blood spots are released for research, the identities are not released with them. Parents are not notified because because no one knows whose blood spots are going out -- there's no way to notify the parents if children's names don't match the spots.
3. "Third parties" means the department of public health (in which my sister-in-law is a committed, earnest epidemiologist who does pediatric cancer research, in part using the blood spots). It does not mean insurance companies, future employers, etc.
4. The claim that there is a genetic database that will be connected to a big medical database with identifying information is simply false. There are no plans to create this.
5. Nothing "illegal" happened.
Of course the storage of blood spots for research even under these conditions is something about which reasonable people can disagree, but I was shocked at the amount of bad info got passed around in the state of Minnesota regarding this bill.
Posted by: shaun | Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 10:23 AM
No, JFS did not misrepresent the Minnesota situation, as it was reporting directly from CCHC in Minnesota. You may find it helpful to see the rest of the story since that March post:
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/05/government-of-people-in-action.html
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/04/update-on-dna-ownership-and-genetic.html
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2008/03/dna-warehouse-legislation-update.html
Posted by: Rene | Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 05:05 PM
OK, well I'm quite comfortable saying the CCHC totally misrepresents the law in Minnesota. A genetic profile of each child? Absurd! The personal data is not stored with the spots, so that is not possible. The studies referenced are done with gigantic samples (to make the studies legitimate) that have no identities connected to them. It would be impossible for those doing the studies to go back and say, "this child has this genetic profile, that child has that genetic profile." That is not happening nor is there any call for it to happen. Individual children are not going to be screened for their tendency towards violence -- that's flat out not true.
As I said earlier, this is an important issue to talk about, but quite difficult to talk about when the facts are misrepresented. Then anyone in favor of storing the spots can be dismissed as a nutty fascist. There is a real debate here, but the CCHC helping. I don't mean to call the who group into question, but it is an advocacy group, not a neutral body. They're not giving the whole (or accurate) picture.
Posted by: shaun | Tuesday, July 01, 2008 at 07:37 PM