Newborn Screening Is on a Collision Course with Public Health Ethics

Abstract

Newborn screening was established over 50 years ago to identify cases of disorders that were serious, urgent, and treatable, mirroring the criteria of Wilson and Jungner. In the last decade, conditions have been added to newborn screening that do not strictly meet these criteria, and genomic newborn screening is beginning to be discussed. Some of these new and proposed additions to newborn screening entail serious public health ethical issues that need to be explored.

Keywords

• newborn screening
• ethics
• consent
• DNA sequencing
• genome
• genomic newborn screening