Insurance Companies Shouldn’t Seek Genetic Test Results, Says Privacy Watchdog
By Steve Rennie,
The Canadian Press
| 07. 10. 2014
OTTAWA—Canada’s privacy watchdog is urging insurance companies and others to stop asking for access to the results of existing genetic tests at this time.
Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien says it is becoming more of a challenge to protect people’s genetic privacy with recent advances in science and technology.
“We are calling on the industry to refrain from asking for existing test results to assess insurance risk until the industry can clearly show that these tests are necessary and effective in assessing risk,” Therrien said in a statement Thursday.
“This would
allow people to undergo genetic testing for various purposes without fear that the results may have a negative impact if they apply for insurance.”
There are now hundreds of genetic tests available to help spot genes known to increase a person’s risk of developing certain medical conditions.
But some people may decline tests for fear a positive result may mean they could face discrimination from insurance companies or their employers.
“It is not reasonable and not necessary for the insurance industry to ask for genetic information when they’re making their...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
