A DNA Database in the NHS: Your Freedom up for Sale?
A DNA database in the NHS: Your freedom up for sale? May 2013 In April 2013, the Caldicott Committee, including Government Chief Scientist Sir Mark Walport, proposed new rules for data-sharing which would allow the Government to build a DNA database of the whole population of England in the NHS by stealth.1 The plan is to make NHS medical records and people’s genetic information available to commercial companies and to use public-private partnerships to build a system where all private information about every citizen is also accessible to the police, social workers, security services and Government. The Wellcome Trust, which was involved in the Human Genome Project and was led by Walport for ten years, has produced a plan which involves including a variant file, containing the whole genome of every person minus the reference genome, as an attachment to every medical record in the NHS in England.2 This data would be made available to ‘researchers’ (including commercial companies) for data-mining in the cloud and personalised risk assessments would be returned to individuals. The aim is to transform the NHS in line with proposals developed more than a decade ago by former GlaxoSmithKline Chairman Sir Richard Sykes. This is expected to massively expand the market for medicines, medical tests and other products, such as supplements and cholesterol-lowering margarines, by allowing products to be marketed to individuals based on personal risk assessments, created using statistical analysis of genetic data, medical records and other health information. The proposal to build a DNA database in the NHS was endorsed by the Human Genomics Strategy Group in 20123,4 and the Government (led by Prime Minister David Cameron) has quietly adopted this recommendation without telling members of the public.
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