4w ago

All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years

www.theguardian.com

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4w ago

All babies in England to get DNA test to assess risk of diseases within 10 years

www.theguardian.com /science/2025/jun/20/all-babies-in-england-to-get-dna-test-to-assess-risk-of-diseases-within-10-years

18 comments

Yay, Gattaca.
- Came here to say this.
I'm sure this won't be abused by law enforcement. Nope.
- Post-birth screening is already very widely utilised in most western countries.
  E.g.
- Of course not, the rozzers won’t be able to afford to buy it from Palantir.
Already widely used in the western world, glad we're catching up. This will save lives, hopefully lessen strain on the NHS, reduce waiting times, and reduce the misery of kids silently suffering without proper support.
Goes without saying, but this data should remain with the NHS, and the only time it should leave is when appropriately anonymised for medical research purposes (which already happens, the NHS helps a shit load of international researchers).
- Already widely used in the western world
  Really?
  
  Minnesota, here. New parent. Can confirm! The full on DNA test is optional. Parents can make informed decisions and prepare for new lifestyles of supporting a kid that’s differently abled.
- It should not remain in the NHS in my opinion. It should be deleted after the analysis is done.
  
  You don't think having a full genome and medical history of everyone who'd been in contact with the NHS would be useful to researchers?
Well parental consent to this is going to be interesting, given the father only gets it if the name is on the birth certificate (so marrital state is relevant) and that wouldn't happen for several weeks. So really the mother gets to decide...so paternity fraud is going be forefront of discussions.
In Isreal, it's illegal to get genetic testing done
- What's the logic there?
Sounds like they need to speed up the test, if it takes 10 years then they won’t be babies anymore by the time they get results.
One of the things we did during the pandemic was significantly scale up or ability to sequence genomes. We were literally watching the virus evolve near real-time because a large chunk of samples could be sequenced and processed.
While they're are obviously data privacy concerns, for which the UK has a fairly long history of legislating for, having a full sequence for every newborn could allow for all sorts of cheaper early interventions. I'm sure the dataset would also be very useful for researchers as well.
Thank god. Paternity fraud finally not so easy.
Can't believe England's going to get this before people stop fucking their cousin.

18 comments