Ethical Consideration In Genetic Testing Essay

Just as most bioethicists and medical professionals agree that genetic testing for curable or preventable diseases is beneficial to patients, they also agree that genetic testing for incurable and untreatable diseases, such as Alzheimer's, is useless (Hubbard & Wald, 1999; Ridley, 1999). Although a negative test may afford a person the reassurance that he or she will not develop the disease, a positive test could be a death sentence. For example, since 1986 people who are at risk for Huntington's disease have had the option of being tested for the mutation on chromosome 4 that is linked to the disease (Ridley, 1999). In Genome, Nancy Wexler, a woman who set out to identify the Huntington's gene in the late 1970s, relates the story of a woman who asked doctors whether or not she had Huntington's disease (Ridley, 1999). Although the doctors found that the woman was showing subtle signs of the disease, she could not detect these signs herself. The doctors, rather than telling the woman that she had the disease, let her believe that she was well and did not have Huntington's disease. After the woman left the doctors' office, the woman's friend came into the office and asked the doctors what they had said to the woman, because earlier the woman had told her friend that she

Ethics, in our society, are the moral principles that govern our behavior, dictating what is right from wrong. The specifics of ethics changes as values in our society change and evolve. This occurs in Rebecca Skloots book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. One major reoccurring theme in the book is the lack of informed consent and autonomy. Fortunately, now there are safeguards which protect human rights in regard to health care and research. The Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services, created The Belmont Report, which is one such safeguard establishing principles for all human research (USDHHS, 1979). This paper will discuss the ethical issue of informed consent within The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the disregard to parts of the Belmont Report, as well as compare the role of the nurse in charge of Henrietta’s care versus the standards of care set for modern nurses.

Genetic testing has brought about many changes in the way many couples look at conceiving and raising families. Through genetic testing you are able to screen for the increased chance that a fetus may have one of many congenital disorders, or even identify gene changes that are responsible for a disease that has already been diagnosed (Genetic Testing, March 2015). Unfortunately genetic testing is not always exact, in some cases giving parents false negatives or false positive results. Even if the results are accurate, there is the burden of knowledge once you know the results indicate a genetic abnormality such as Down’s syndrome. While caring for a 2 year old male patient with developmental delays and anotia, I learned that genetic testing had been started but never completed on the child. Genetic testing could help to identify genetic disorders that led to the child’s developmental delays and possible future disorders that may develop. The ethical dilemma I will be discussing to the ANA Ethical dilemma of the impact of informed consent of genetic testing on children for adult onset diseases and disorders.

In the patient confidentiality case of Carlos, a 21 year old Hispanic male is being discharged from his hospital stay for a gunshot wound. Carlos is intended to receive nursing care at home from his sister, Consuela. Carlos is secretly a homosexual and is concerned that his secret will be revealed and be disgraced by his family. Carlos pleaded with his physician not to inform his sister that he is HIV-positive. Not informing Consuela would seem to increase her risk of contracting HIV while attending to Carlos’ wounds. The ethical issue is whether Carlos’ physician is justified in breaching confidentiality on the grounds that he has the “duty to warn”

The Goal of the Human Genome Project is to obtain genetic mapping information and to determine the complete sequence of all human DNA by the year of 2005. The project started in 1990 and 180 million dollars are being spent on it annually. This adds up to a total of over 2 billion dollars for the 15 year budget. Of this 2 billion dollars budgeted, 5% is spent annually on the ethical, legal and social issues. This report focused on some of these issues.

With the utilization of the Act-utilitarianism mindset, an alternative plan of action to focus on the circumstances surrounding Andrea and the community at large can be established using Uustals ethical decision making model. The nine steps identified by Uustal can allow the nursing process to be applied in an effort to guide the nurse in practicing proper judgment. The quandary involves community, personal and patient dilemmas. While many nurses strive for adhesion to values of patient autonomy and keeping ones word, the very nature of health care can raise cause for nurses to contradict and deviate from their own ethical stand points, all in an effort to do the right thing. Due to Andrea’s development of cervical cancer, nurse Hathaway was right in disclosing the minor’s disease to her parents. Adolescents usually are covered by their family’s insurance, but they may not have coverage for unaccompanied care, and they may

What I personally have always had an interest in but have never been able to recover solid answers on, is whether or not human genetic testing can be considered ethical, and what biomedical ethics should guide medical, specifically reproductive technologies.

This was a peer reviewed journal article. The article identifies particular ethical, legal and social issues nurses encounter when incorporating new knowledge about genomic information into health-related practices. With the fast emerging development of new genomic technologies and discoveries, nursing education is imperative for delivering exceptional patient care. Therefore, nurses will also need to be able to answer challenging questions that surrounds this new evolution of an advanced healthcare. This article will give the group project an ideal glimpse of how science will continue to push forward while also enhancing nurses ability to deal with difficult ethical implications.

Genetic testing, do we or don’t we? This is the question. Advances in science, as they call them, are able to screen for some types of genetic disorders. Although this type of testing has allowed the opportunity to test couples who are at risk for Tay-Sachs and others who are at risk for Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Anemia, and Huntington’s disease there are still vast limitations. There is a potential for the loss of privacy, test errors, psychological and social stress. Overall genetic testing has the potential to be wholly deterministic and results in information that is simply probabilistic. Errors could occur and result in severely misreading test results deluding individuals about their personal health. The contingency surrounding genetic

If you were able to pick what characteristics your child is going to have, would you? From the color of their hair, to maybe even their sexuality. Is it okay to alter the characteristics of your child based on your own opinion of who you want them to be? What about the question of a baby being required to have a genetic screening before or right after birth? Should that be allowed to happen with the fact of the parents, or anyone for that matter, not knowing who is going to have access to these records? In a scientific manner, this seems like it is not that big of a deal. Thinking about this ethically is the what everyone is concerned about. I do not think that this is ethically okay. Where do we draw the line?

I agree that although nutritional genomics seems promising and could have significant positive impact on today’s health care there are a lot of ethical, social, and legal issues that impede progress. I concur that information derived from nutritional genomics should be treated the same way as other health related information. I don’t think medical information should be disclosed to any third parties without the patient’s consent. The good thing is the government is already aware of the possible discriminatory risks resulting from these studies and they have taken action towards resolving it. According to Jones, (2013) “The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, Public Law 110-233, 122 STAT. 881, prohibits discrimination based on an individual’s genetic information in both the health coverage and employment contexts” (para. 2). This means there is legal protection against the misuse of genetic information. Although this is not a complete solution to all the issues, it is a step forward. Reilly and Debusk (2008) stated that nutritional genomics is still in its infancy state. Researchers, lawmakers, and health care professionals still have the opportunity to resolve these issues and make policies that will help in the implementation of this science.

type of medical test that identifies changes in chromosomes, genes, or proteins”. “The results of

To many people today, the journey to personhood begins in the process of In Vitro Fertilization –IVF. The dramatic advances in this field has led to the ability for genetic alterations associated with diseases and other inherited characteristics. These two independent fields of genetic testing and IVF each present some issues that are technically, legally and ethnically complicated. Genetic testing allows for parents to choose which embryos to implant in a woman based on the genetic tests results. This has brought up a lot of new scientific, social and ethical predicaments. Many people have began to consider not just the implications of these new genetic diagnostic tool but whether core ethical and practical concerns surrounding IVF are

Although this technology may seem like science fiction, the consequences it can bring, most specifically surrounding privacy and ownership, can be overwhelming. Genetic information is different than any other type of information because it is biologically unique. John Quackenbush, a Harvard professor of computational biology and bioinformatics, explains: “As soon as you touch genomic data, that information is fundamentally identifiable...I can erase your address and Social Security number and every other identifier, but I can’t anonymize your genome without wiping out the information that I need to analyze” (Shaw). As the use of big data continues to expand, so does the risk of security for an individual’s genome. An important aspect of genetic

The obligation of confidentiality is virtually universal in professional codes of ethics, particularly with respect to HIV/AIDS (Naidoo & Vernillo, 2012). Consequential arguments thus support disclosure of confidential information such as HIV status as ethically permissible in the context of a “duty to warn”, as in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, if and only if the probability and magnitude of harm are major to a third party such as a patient’s spouse, partner or other third party (Naidoo & Vernillo, 2012). Given the increasing infection rate of HIV worldwide, polices must be upheld and revised as needed to protect healthcare providers, patients, and society generally against discrimination which is another ethical issue (Naidoo & Vernillo,