The recommendations, outlined in an essay appearing Friday in the journal Science, say these laws or regulations should be uniform across the country rather than having different levels of protection from one state to another. At least two bills on genetic privacy issues have been introduced in Congress this year, although no action has been taken yet. Several tests have become available, either in clinical research settings or in the medical community at large, that tell if a person has a gene that predisposes toward a certain disease such as breast or colon cancer. There is already anecdotal evidence that some employers are using this information to squeeze out those employees and their potentially big medical bills, or to limit their health insurance. Some have conducted gene tests such as for sickle cell anemia that afflicts black Americans without the workers' informed consent, said Karen Rothenberg, lead author of the Science article and a health law expert at the University of Maryland.
Gene tests tell of a predisposition to a disease.
In most cases they cannot tell whether a person is 100 percent certain to get the disease, how severe the disease will be or whether the person would become sick at age 30 or 90. Morever, everyone has some disposition to genetic disease, but not all those genetic flaws have yet been identified in the lab. Christina DeMark, a saleswoman from Milwaukee, told the news conference she was fired a month after telling an employer that she had the gene for Huntington's disease, which killed her mother. She said she has no symptoms of the disease. Her employer said she was dismissed for cause unrelated to her medical condition, she said.