#geneticdiscrimination — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #geneticdiscrimination, aggregated by home.social.
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"What happened to Bill, and to dozens of other people whose experiences have been documented by disease advocates and on social media, is perfectly legal. Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.
For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted."
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"What happened to Bill, and to dozens of other people whose experiences have been documented by disease advocates and on social media, is perfectly legal. Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.
For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted."
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#GeneticData #GeneticDiscrimination #DataProtection: "Add it all together, and there’s a hell of a lot of genetic data out there.
It isn’t always clear how secure this data is, or who might end up getting their hands on it—and how that information might affect people’s lives. I don’t want my insurance provider or my employer to make decisions about my future on the basis of my genetic test results, for example. Scientists, ethicists and legal scholars aren’t clear on the matter either. They are still getting to grips with what genetic discrimination entails—and how we can defend against it.
If we're going to protect ourselves from genetic discrimination, we first have to figure out what it is. Unfortunately, no one has a good handle on how widespread it is..."
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#GeneticData #GeneticDiscrimination #DataProtection: "Add it all together, and there’s a hell of a lot of genetic data out there.
It isn’t always clear how secure this data is, or who might end up getting their hands on it—and how that information might affect people’s lives. I don’t want my insurance provider or my employer to make decisions about my future on the basis of my genetic test results, for example. Scientists, ethicists and legal scholars aren’t clear on the matter either. They are still getting to grips with what genetic discrimination entails—and how we can defend against it.
If we're going to protect ourselves from genetic discrimination, we first have to figure out what it is. Unfortunately, no one has a good handle on how widespread it is..."