User:Bassgt41/sandbox

Bioethics
Newborn genetic screening has progressed with the aid of new genomic sequencing technologies, such as tandem mass spectrometry, over the years. Yet, with this progress a number of moral dilemmas arise alongside it that pose a threat to the foundation in which these newborn screening tests were founded. The initial goal of newborn screening was to protect the welfare of children by testing for diseases that met the requirements for early detection:
 * The disease has a destructive result
 * It's extremely beneficial to start treatment early in order to prevent the disease
 * Children affected cannot be diagnosed by symptoms in time to begin effective treatment
 * Screening tests are reliable at detecting positive (has the disease) results

But as additional tests are talked about being added, issues arise. Many question if the expanded testing still falls under the requirements necessary to justify the additional tests. Many of the new diseases being tested for are rare and have no known treatment, while some of the diseases need not be treated until later in life. This raises more issues such as if there is no available treatment for the disease should we test for it at all? And if we do, what do we tell the families of those with children bearing one of the untreatable diseases? Studies show that the more rare the disease is and the more diseases being tested for, the more likely the tests are to produce false-positives. This is an issue because the newborn period is a crucial time for the parent’s to bond with the child, and it has been noted that ten percent of parents whose children were diagnosed with a false-positive still worried that their child was fragile and/or sickly even though they were not. Therefore interfering with the parent-child bond from forming as it would have otherwise. This makes many fear that parents may begin to opt out of having their newborns screened. Many parents are also concerned about what happens with their infant’s blood samples after screening. The samples were originally taken to test for preventable diseases, but with the advance in genomic sequencing technologies many samples are being kept for DNA identification and research. Which doesn’t sit well with many parents. Furthering the fear that more children will be opted out of newborn screening from parents who see the kept samples as a form of research done on their child.