Y2K Bug Blamed For Miscalculated Down Syndrome Risk

Albanach writes: "The BBC are reporting in this story that the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, England is blaming the Millennium Bug for getting wrong 150 tests for Down Syndrome with four mothers going on to give birth to affected children." The article actually idicates that four women were pregnant with Down Syndrome babies, and that two of them brought the pregnancies to term.

Comments

hmmm...

[teknopurge]

so because the age of the mother was calculated incorrectly, it fucked up the results? i find it hard to belive the doctors wouldn't notice a mistake such as that....

-teknopurge

I am not pro-life or anything

[The Slashdolt]

but should this be "y2k bug saves two lives"? It seems that (according to the article) the two mothers would have aborted their babies had they known they were going to have downs syndrom. I do consider myself pro-choice, but I don't think that aborting a baby just because it has downs syndrome is the right thing to do. I know many people with downs syndrome, including some family members, and there is no reason they can't live a happy life with parents that love them.

It's not about saving babies or not

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

It's about how such an important piece of code passed dec. 31 1999 without beeing tested against Y2k, specially when everybody involved with the code knew it uses dates to give the result.

I wonder how many lines of code are still there, untested, waiting for someone to run them and screw things up big time...

Sanity Checks

[_flan]

This is a good example of how software is not tested. According to the article the problem was due to the mother's age not being correctly calculated. My question is, were there any sanity checks on the mother's age in the first place? Probably not.

It seems logical that for a critical application you would try to have as much sanity-checking code as possible. It should be plainly obvious that no one should have a negative age or be giving birth if they are over 100 years old. And sanity checking code is easy.

The common excuse, though, is the ol' "garbage in, garbage out". Which is fine -- but what if you don't know you have garbage? The software -- if it can -- should at least give a warning.

This gets down to one of the basic questions for software testing: What inputs can you rely on?

Software engineers know by now (at least mostly) that all user input has to be checked and validated. But what about system data, especially something as basic as the date?

The only way to protect against unexpected bad data is to do sanity checking at all steps in the process. If you know even a little bit about the domain, you can usually set reasonable bounds.

Software isn't really engineered unless it makes these kinds of checks.

You suck

[nanojath]

I can't get over how many people are either not reading or paying no attention to the article. There is NO reason to believe these mothers would have aborted these pregnancies. The point of these tests is to give the mothers the best understanding of their situation and to promote the use of more accurate and complete tests at the earliest stages. The problem, as clearly stated in the article, is that these mothers had an assurance that wasn't justified - and so were not prepared, as they could have been, to deal with the reality of their situations.

This story is providing a nice little showcase of how pro-lifers are so fixated on a single topic that they are incapable of grasping a reality with a broader context. Thanks, I've never been more confidently pro-choice.

Has anyone noted the article explicitely states that 2 pregnancies were terminated despite the false negatives?

Re:The Calendar says 2001--but it seems to be 1984

[nanojath]

I'm mystified as to where you are finding the message in this article that suggests in any way that the author's issue is with terminating pregnancies. The article explicitly states that the issue is the mothers not getting the best information for her range of options - termination not even being mentioned - of as you note, choosing to have amniocentesis at the safest time. There is a clear benefit to knowing in advance if your child is going to have a serious medical concern of any time - it allows proper prenatal care and both practical and emotional preparation. The point, as the article states, is that they should have known they were high risk but were misinformed they were low risk.

Re:The Calendar says 2001--but it seems to be 1984

[geekoid]

Would you and you're wife had child #3 if you knew she would have down syndrom before you got pregnant?

As a parent I know how hard it can be to be impartial to that question when you see your beautifull child every day.

this is a serious question, and I am really curious.