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In 26 Hours, Sick Newborns Go From Genome Scan To Diagnosis (ieee.org)
the_newsbeagle writes: Parsing the first human genome took a decade, but times have changed. Now, within 26 hours, doctors can scan a sick baby's entire genome and analyze the resulting list of mutations to produce a diagnosis. Since genetic diseases are the top cause of death for infants (abstract), rapidly diagnosing a rare genetic disease can be life-saving. The 26-hour pipeline results from automated technologies that handle everything from the genome sequencing to the diagnosis, says the doctor involved: "We want to take humans out of the equation, because we're the bottleneck."
If the insurance pays for a full genome scan, they will want to see the results. And then before you know it, they will be tagging as many conditions as possible as "pre-existing" and using that to justify partial / no coverage for them once the newborn is home.
Yeah, it's great to know the information, but it sets you up for a lifetime of getting fucked by the insurance companies (not that the 2010 "affordable care act" didn't set that up regardless).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They currently won't even pay for cytochrome P450 tests, and those are used to screen for metabolism differences that affect drug clearance/pharmacokinetics and can literally kill someone.
"Gattaca"
Keeping people alive you know are faulty is kinda senseless unless you have ways to fix the problems.
I know this attitude is harsh and frankly, I myself probably wouldn't have made the cut either... but seeing as we're 8 billion getting more feeble with every generation... I don't know... this just doesn't seem like a very good trend.
Which usually leads to a lifetime of huge medical costs.
In a system of collective health care (after all, that's what "insurance" is), we can't pay for *everything*, and hard, heart-wrenching choices must be made.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Genome scan? Not exome scan?
Humans are the bottleneck.
All hail our future robotic overlords, who will be superior to humans in every way imaginable.
if it ain't his, why bother with it. let the whore and her squeeze pay for and raise the thing
The jail / prison covers pre-existing conditions and I think at most all you have pay it you can is a $3-$8 copay.
Also the The jail / prison covers stuff that the ER does not and free room + board is on the side.
It was definitely a corporate handout by congress (and also, not what Obama asked for... hence I never call it "ObamaCare"), but it also definitely made some things better. I know quite a few people who have healthcare for the first time in many years, some of them with pre-existing conditions, others who simply couldn't afford it. Care ranging from from a CPAP mask to a much-needed case of testosterone therapy. In fact, if it hadn't been for the malfuckery of the Montana republicans, who callously shot the legs out from under the ACA by bitch-screwing the medicaid expansion for years, it would have done even more.
Next year - assuming no further malfuckery on the part of the various Kochsuckers out there, one 62 y/o lady I know who is both diabetic and a breast cancer survivor, is going to have decent, continuous medical care for the first time in her life. Her breast cancer costs were covered by a vertical breast/cervical treatment program, and she's 10+ years out now, so that's good, but as she points out, if it had been liver cancer, she would have had no viable options at all. Now she will. Hopefully. If the ACA hadn't been so adroitly interfered with, she would have already.
So while I'm totally on-board with "could have been a lot better", the way it was prior to the ACA... that was a whole damn sight worse.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"No, sweetie, we already scanned your baby's DNA a few hours after he was born. What? No, I know you didn't ask us to. No, neither did the father. Yes, it is a little expensive. But don't worry, it's already been paid for. These nice people who work for someone named something like "Nissa" or "Phoebe" volunteered to pay for genetic scans of all the babies born in our hospital system. All they ask in return is that we send them a copy of each scan. So we do. Isn't that nice?"
As a poster-child for the counterpoint: Stephen Hawking
Evolution and natural selection for stronger individuals is a thing. Has been a thing. But in no way does that imply that we can't make decisions for ourselves now that we have some idea what we're doing. That's without even considering the fact that we're going to be able to fix all this stuff in fairly short order, in terms of evolutionary time scales, so your worries about the "trend" are truly pointless.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Editors, please return your geek cards.
On the other hand, I don't want the government in it. Not because I don't want people to get "free" medicine, but because I think the government will screw it up, or worse, obtain control over the lives of the people who are supposed to be keeping it in check. ...
Unfortunately, the one thing worse than having government involved is having the government not involved.
Health care is an economic case where the assumptions that make a free market efficient don't apply. When providers have the ability to literally say "pay what we ask or die... and decide right now," there's not a lot of economic leverage available. And, worse, people making these decisions are often sick, in pain, unconscious, woozy from painkillers, or in the grips of Alzheimer's disease, and can't shop around. Unless they have insurance. But the insurance company's profit comes from kicking people off of the insurance if they get sick. The insurance companies that are most successful in figuring out ways to terminate coverage of people who are sick out-compete the ones who don't. After a while, all of the insurance companies do this-- the ones who don't go out of business.
As a society, we have made a decision that we don't think it's right to turn people back at the emergency room just because they can't pay. So, one way or another we are paying for the health care of people who can't pay. The only question is, are we going to do this in a thought-out way? Or in a makeshift, not-thought-out way?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
and biometrically registered, down to every single base-pair of your DNA, and the people at the top decide that neither you nor your parents have anything to say about it. Truly wonderous times.
you'd think it'd be a lot faster.
We should know, from birth, what genetic issues we are going to face. This will help not only the person affected, but also the medical system, respond in an appropriate manner.
And for those worrying about the insurance companies using the data to tag pre-existing conditions, MAYBE you should rethink the idea of making medicine a for-profit industry. I mean, what the fuck, you're putting a price on every procedure. How do you decide if a nurse giving an aspirin is a $10 procedure or a $500 procedure (and we know what anyone wanting more profit would pick).
Medicine for profit is a sickness on society. People should be treated for their medical conditions, and given the support and help required to enable preventative medicine as well (stop drinking that 1.5 litre big gulp fat ass, and get out and go for a walk instead). And society should pay those costs, and none of it should have a profit motive.
DNA scanning doesn't always work and at best can only give you a probability of what's wrong.
sure, do the test on a robot! all those genome tests will be negative, way faster to do the test if you remove the human!
I don't think it should be free market controlled. I just don't think it should be government controlled.
There needs to be a third way.
The free market's treatment of health care reflects the reality that to make profit on it, you must let people die. Attempting to save everyone from every condition is never going to be profitable. It may never even be *possible* profit or not.
The government's handling of the care is less based on the need to profit, but ultimately has it's own pitfalls. People vote themselves more benefits until it is too late. And then they get scared and either elect people who promise Reform Now! or they elect people who protect their entitlements to the last gasp, even if it pulls down the country into anarchy.
Even when the government health care works, it encourages the government to force you to take steps like eating a certain way or doing certain things which may well be healthy, but reduces our free will.
I really think that a non-government non-profit medical cooperative should be formed which covers medical care with no profit whatsoever, and everyone can sign up for. The plan would have to have certain limits which would accept that some people are simply going to die or live under certain limitations, but it's charter is to remain as common sense as possible about care while making patient quality of life the first concern.
We can even elect the management, but we should not be letting general legislators be in charge of that budget. And there should be no links between the government and that entity. Information sharing with the government would be both forbidden and unnecessary.
From a systems perspective, what would make most sense would be to sequence and verify the genome as early as possible in the pregnancy. Any fetus not meeting the acceptance criteria of no major defects would be aborted, preventing that damaged artifact from sullying downstream systems like the social support net, institutions of education and medicine, etc.
Insurance companies could use the fetal screening as a gate to determine what coverage your future kid would be granted. Any major defects would narrow those options to abortion and nothing else.
And totally in line with a capitalist mindset.
>"We want to take humans out of the equation, because we're the bottleneck."
This is how it all ends.
It doesn't usually work like that.
If you get a genome scan you learn you have a higher chance of developing certain problems. That doesn't make those problems an existing condition.
Except for a relatively small number of severe genetic disorders, the knowledge of what the genome says about human health is largely unknown. The problem is that genes work in networks, and each individual gene frequently works in multiple different networks at the same time. So it's not as simple as, "has gene variant X, therefore has disease Y." Instead, one person with gene variant X might have problems, while another might have no issue at all, because there are other genes that influence how gene variant X behaves.
The fact that genes work in networks like this makes teasing out which genes have which effect into an unbelievably difficult statistical problem that would likely require an analysis of millions of DNA-health correlations to have any hope of attributing most gene-caused health problems. Nobody has done this kind of study yet, but there are a lot of crackpot doctors who are claiming to have this impossible knowledge already.
We can even elect the management
This is how french social healthcare was designed after WWII. Unfortunately, the government quickly removed elected administrators and legislators took duty for the budget. But today it is still separated from State main budget: They cannot take healthcare money to bomb some random foreign country.
Hi this is my first post, My son has FoxG1, read his story here http://www.foxg1.com/faces-of-.... I want this to work for us. The FoxG1 foundation has identified 160 fox children, we are in touch with CompBio at MIT to run analysis / full genome sequencing / analysis for correlations anything that helps find a cure, on the 160 DNA samples and scan public databases for finding out if incidence is higher. How do we get someone to pick the bill for 160 full sequences? I got to write to the company, mentioned in this post. Slashdot community help me. Add as many contact details as you can think of or anyone who is working on anything that can remotely assist us. We want Big data/ pharma / garage start up biotech’s / pharma giants / IBM / NIH anybody to help us. We are a 5 year old foundation and are looking to set up a Scientific Advisory Board. Suggestions. We are trying our best to fix my 2 year old son so please excuse any immature brash comments from this one if you could. Slashdot is full of fantastic talent, help us change the world. For my son at least. Regards Vivek (Father to Kush)
Didn't we just have a discussion about a trial where the defense wanted to inspect the program that flagged the defendant as the guilty party based on genetic evidence, and the company complained about trade secrets? Oh, yeah we did....
I'll put down $20 on these things pumping out confirmed "diagnoses" for ADD / ADHD in a large number of cases.
Bonus points for when the elementary school wants to place the kid on meds because they looked up the kid's genome profile as part of the admissions process......
How about gene sampling foetuses? If done early enough, then expectant mothers can choose whether to abort. That way we can start filtering out known genetic diseases.
I have one small nit to pick with your post. Not all government based health care forces a reduction on free will.
Your right to free will is not reduced, people will still have the right to make silly choices that are unhealthy but we as a collective will have the right to say we will not pay for your extra health care because of your unhealthy choices.
Free will is your right to make a decision and to accept the consequences of your decision - we are not reducing your free will we are just enforcing a consequence of your desicion in relation to your health care and personal budget that you refused to acknowledged as your cost.
Unfortunately, by keeping genetically defective children alive they are doing the entire human race a disservice.
Actually, I was talking more about the indirect effects.
Why did someone try to limit the sale of large containers of soda in NYC? It was perceived that it is the government's business to determine what size container you can drink soda or other beverages from. Now, in certain cases, you could argue an immediate public safety issue if you, for instance, sold certain things like dynamite in larger containers or certain chemicals, but here we're talking about something that is being based on drinks being labelled a public health crisis, or something.
The reason for laws like that is effectively moralizing. It is today's answer to prohibition and blue laws.
However, if you add the responsibility for a health care system to the government's responsibilities, you will have the moralizing, and then some politician will add the comment that "it is costing our National Health Care system billions of dollars in unnecessary procedures."
You are of the opinion that we would take the option of simply disallowing care for those behaviors, but it's not that easy. What caused this person to have poor teeth, or more brittle bones? Do you vote to prevent care to people who drink soda? Do you prevent care to people who eat red meat?
My problem with your scenario isn't that we will not cover those things, my problem is that we *will* cover the results of those behaviors because we can't always see the root cause. And then, to alleviate those costs, we will simply outlaw or encumber activities that we *think* might cause those end results. And that regulation will fall heavily upon behaviors that are unpopular or considered morally incorrect.
Of course, you're right. We wouldn't be affecting free will, we would be affecting liberty.