Lawsuit Possible Over DNA From Baby Sent to Military for National Database

February 22, 2010

statesman.com

By Mary Ann Roser

An Austin lawyer threatened to pursue a new federal lawsuit Monday after learning that some newborn blood samples in Texas went to the U.S. military for potential use in a database for law enforcement purposes.

The Department of State Health Services never mentioned the database to Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, who settled a lawsuit in December with the state over the indefinite storage of newborn blood without parental consent, or to the American-Statesman, which first reported on the little-known blood storage practice last spring. Harrington said he thought another suit was likely unless the health department destroys the information obtained from the blood samples or obtains consent.

“This is the worst case of bad faith I have dealt with as a lawyer,” he said Monday.

Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for the Texas attorney general’s office, which represented the health department, fired back. “During this litigation, Harrington was provided accurate answers to the questions he asked,” he said.

“Once Harrington negotiated $26,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs for himself, accepted a settlement agreement and got his desired headlines, he was satisfied and dropped his

lawsuit against DSHS. It appears recent media reports caused Harrington to backtrack in an effort to obscure how he chose to handle this case,” he said

An article Monday by the Texas Tribune, a news Web site, said the state health department sent 800 anonymous samples to the military to help create a national mitochondrial DNA database. The samples were sent in 2003 and 2007, according to the department’s Web site.

Carrie Williams, a health department spokeswoman, said the program wasn’t mentioned because, “We don’t publicize every agency initiative or contract, and obviously this is a sensitive topic.”

Texas agreed to take part in the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory database project because blood spots might help identify “ethnic or ancestral origins of unidentified corpses using mitochondrial DNA,” Williams said. “We believed it was an important research project that could potentially help in missing persons cases.”

The blood samples are taken from the heel during newborn screening tests for genetic disorders.

The blood spots are collected on coded cards, with the names matching those codes kept on file at the health department. Names are not disclosed without parental consent, the department says.

In March, Harrington sued in federal court on behalf of four parents and a pregnant woman who later dropped out, claiming that the state’s collection and indefinite storage of the samples since 2002 amounted to “an unlawful search and seizure.”

The Legislature approved a law in May that requires medical professionals to inform parents or guardians that the blood spots are being collected, stored and could be used for research. Parents who object could opt out.

In December, Harrington settled his suit when the health department agreed to destroy 5.3 million samples.

“I can’t tell you how many times we sat there, and they said no law enforcement,” Harrington said of the lawsuit discussions. “They said, ‘It’s only about medical research, it’s only about medical research.

Williams said the project has been listed on the Web site for weeks and “falls under the broader category of public health research.”

“Our intentions over the years have been good,” she added, “and we are moving forward with the positive changes to the program.”

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The Government Has Your Baby’s DNA

February 5, 2010

CNN

By Elizabeth Cohen

When Annie Brown’s daughter, Isabel, was a month old, her pediatrician asked Brown and her husband to sit down because he had some bad news to tell them: Isabel carried a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis.

While grateful to have the information — Isabel received further testing and she doesn’t have the disease — the Mankato, Minnesota, couple wondered how the doctor knew about Isabel’s genes in the first place. After all, they’d never consented to genetic testing.

It’s simple, the pediatrician answered: Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it’s often done without the parents’ consent, according to Brad Therrell, director of the National Newborn Screening & Genetics Resource Center.

In many states, such as Florida, where Isabel was born, babies’ DNA is stored indefinitely, according to the resource center.

Many parents don’t realize their baby’s DNA is being stored in a government lab, but sometimes when they find out, as the Browns did, they take action. Parents in Texas, and Minnesota have filed lawsuits, and these parents’ concerns are sparking a new debate about whether it’s appropriate for a baby’s genetic blueprint to be in the government’s possession.

“We were appalled when we found out,” says Brown, who’s a registered nurse. “Why do they need to store my baby’s DNA indefinitely? Something on there could affect her ability to get a job later on, or get health insurance.”

According to the state of Minnesota’s Web site, samples are kept so that tests can be repeated, if necessary, and in case the DNA is ever need to help parents identify a missing or deceased child. The samples are also used for medical research.

Art Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, says he understands why states don’t first ask permission to screen babies for genetic diseases. “It’s paternalistic, but the state has an overriding interest in protecting these babies,” he says.

However, he added that storage of DNA for long periods of time is a different matter.

“I don’t see any reason to do that kind of storage,” Caplan says. “If it’s anonymous, then I don’t care. I don’t have an issue with that. But if you keep names attached to those samples, that makes me nervous.”

DNA given to outside researchers

Genetic testing for newborns started in the 1960s with testing for diseases and conditions that, if undetected, could kill a child or cause severe problems, such as mental retardation. Since then, the screening has helped save countless newborns.

Over the years, many other tests were added to the list. Now, states mandate that newborns be tested for anywhere between 28 and 54 different conditions, and the DNA samples are stored in state labs for anywhere from three months to indefinitely, depending on the state. (To find out how long your baby’s DNA is stored, see this state-by-state list.)

Brad Therrell, who runs the federally funded genetic resource consortium, says parents don’t need to worry about the privacy of their babies’ DNA.

“The states have in place very rigid controls on those specimens,” Therrell says. “If my children’s DNA were in one of these state labs, I wouldn’t be worried a bit.”

The specimens don’t always stay in the state labs. They’re often given to outside researchers — sometimes with the baby’s name attached.

According to a study done by the state of Minnesota, more than 20 scientific papers have been published in the United States since 2000 using newborn blood samples.

The researchers do not have to have parental consent to obtain samples as long as the baby’s name is not attached, according to Amy Gaviglio, one of the authors of the Minnesota report. However, she says it’s her understanding that if a researcher wants a sample with a baby’s name attached, consent first must be obtained from the parents.

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Sugary Drinks During Pregnancy Increase Risk of Diabetes in Child

December 11, 2009

Natural News

By Sherry Baker

According to the American Diabetes Association, approximately 4% of all pregnant women (about 135,000 expectant moms) in the U.S. develop gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) each year. These are women who have never had diabetes before but suddenly have high blood sugar (glucose) levels during the later part of pregnancies. And if not well controlled, the condition can hurt their babies — causing newborns to be so extremely large and heavy their shoulders can be damaged during birth. The babies born to women with GDM often have very low blood glucose levels at birth and may likely have breathing problems, too. What’s more, babies born with excess insulin due to their mother’s GDM often become obese in childhood and they frequently grow into adults who are at risk for type 2 diabetes.

So what causes gestational diabetes? That has remained unclear — but now scientists have discovered what appears to be one cause. A new study, published in the December issue of the journal Diabetes Care, has found for the first time that drinking more than 5 servings of sugar-sweetened cola drinks weekly prior to becoming pregnant significantly raises the risk of developing diabetes during pregnancy.

“Compared with women who consumed less than 1 serving per month, those who consumed more than 5 servings per week of sugar-sweetened cola had a 22% greater GDM risk,” Dr. Liwei Chen, MD, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Health Sciences Center in the New Orleans School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in a statement to the press.

Although scientists have not yet unraveled the precise underlying mechanism resulting in gestational diabetes, they have some strong clues. Previous studies strongly suggested that the main defect in the development of GDM is diminished secretion of insulin combined with pregnancy-induced insulin resistance.

So how do sugar-laden soft drinks fit into this? The research team behind the new study has suggested several explanations for their findings. For one thing, the high sugar intake associated with the drinks may lead to impaired pancreatic cell function. Drinking a large amount of sugar-sweetened beverages contributes to a high glycemic load (GL). The large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars cause levels of glucose in the body to spike — and this can result in insulin resistance and impaired function of pancreatic beta cells, which make insulin.

In their paper, the scientists noted that the only significant association they found between sweet drinks and gestational diabetes involved sugar-sweetened colas. They did not find that other sweet beverages, including fruit drinks, raised the risk of GDM. Dr. Chen suggests that the explanation may simply be that sugar-sweetened colas are tremendously popular in the U.S. and, unfortunately, widely consumed in excess by women of child-bearing years.

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Hospital-Acquired Superbug Infections Soar in Newborn Babies

July 10, 2009

Natural News

by Sherry Baker

It’s scary enough to have a newborn baby in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) because he or she is premature or has health problems. But now there’s reason to worry that many NICUs, places that are supposed to be dedicated to healing and protecting the youngest and most fragile of babies, are actually dangerous environments for neonates. According to a new study just published in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, superbug infections — specifically antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections — in US NICUs increased over 300 percent in less than ten years.

Researchers Dr. Fernanda C. Lessa and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used a national database on hospital-acquired infections and analyzed data voluntarily reported by NICUs between the years of 1995 and 2004. In all, the study involved information collected on nearly 5.9 million patient-days in 149 NICUs across the country.

In newborns, infections that occur during the first three days of life are most often acquired during labor and delivery. On the other hand, late-onset infections, defined as infections that developed more than three days after a child was born, are known to be primarily transmitted by parents, doctors, nurses and other health care personnel. The investigators focused on late-onset infections and found that out of about 4,400 Staph infections with antibiotic resistance, 23 percent were found to be the result of a MRSA superbug.

From 1995 to 2004, the rate of late-onset MRSA infections soared from less than one for every 10,000 hospital days to three infections per 10,000 hospital days — an enormous increase of 308 percent. The types of MRSA infections were not found to change during the years studied. About 30 percent involved bloodstream infections. Other frequent kinds of MRSA infections that were identified included pneumonia and eye infections (conjunctivitis).

For some reason, the steepest rise in MRSA infections occurred after 2002. While the tiniest babies with extremely low birth weights of 1,000 grams (about 35 ounces) had the sharpest increase in MRSA infections, the superbug infection rate actually rose in all birth weight groups.

The ever increasing rate of superbugs has become a worldwide public health problem, with Staph bacteria developing resistance to commonly used antibiotics. MRSA infections have increasingly been found within communities and not just in hospitals. However, in the new study the Staph strains found in NICUs were clearly in the class of superbugs responsible for hospital-acquired infections, not those which have been reported in the non-medical community setting.

So what’s the bottom line result of the study? According to researchers Dr. Fernanda C. Lessa and colleagues at the CDC there is clearly a need for healthcare workers to follow routine infection control steps that are already well-known to be effective in preventing the spreading of MRSA infections. They aren’t high tech chemicals or vaccines, either. Instead, the most important is simple hand washing.

As reported earlier in Natural News, one approach to fighting superbugs in hospitals has already backfired. A study showed that instead of killing potentially dangerous infections, disinfectant wipes may actually spread drug-resistant and sometimes deadly bacteria.

Click here for the full report and links from NaturalNews.com