Baby Blood Data Breaches?
December 28, 2009Things certainly have become much more interesting over the weekend. A number of countries have suddenly realized that there is something of a data privacy issue when it comes to heel prick tests of babies.
Take the instance of Ireland. According to the timesonlink.co.uk, a Dublin hospital has created a DNA database of babies born in the country that goes as far back as 1984. (Ooooh…Orwellian!)
Unknown to the DPC, the hospital has amassed 1,548,300 blood samples from “heel prick tests” on newborns which are sent to it for screening, creating, in effect, a secret national DNA database. The majority of hospitals act on implied or verbal consent and do not inform parents what happens to their child’s sample.
Now, there are other controversies to the above controversy, such as this not really being a database. Someone made this comment:
Mark Sugrue wrote:
In what sense is this a DNA database? No computer system exists – this is blood samples on paper in a room. No database exists.
This is a non story.
A non-story? Perhaps because his Pollyanna-ish outlook in life limits him from seeing the obvious. Well, that, and his inability to read the article to the end:
The retention of newborn screening cards has caused controversy in Australia and New Zealand where the DNA has been used by police to help to solve crimes. A sample in New Zealand was used to identify the father of a dead child against the wishes of the mother.
Let’s make it clear: in the above cases, too, the blood was on cards. Do Kiwis and Ozzies posses special magic that allows them to turn blood on cards into usable information?
Yes. These magicians are officially called lab technicians. Sheesh, some people. A database is not called a database because it exists on a computer. It’s called a database because it contains data. Blood = data. Especially ever since the human genome was fully mapped.
