Parents may remember that shortly after their child was born, doctors gave the baby a routine blood test that involved a quick heel prick. The tests are done to check for dozens of life-threatening genetic and metabolic conditions like cystic fibrosis. But the tests are sometimes stored for years and used for other tests.
Should states keep those blood samples? Kaiser Health News recently raised that question. Michelle Andrews, Kaiser Health News correspondent, joined KMOX to explain more.
"In most instances, states require that those tests be done, and they don't ask the parents," Andrews said. "There may be a few instances if someone has a religious objection where they can object to having that heel-stick test. But that's not the norm."
Andrews found in her research that in some states like Michigan, the leftover blood from those tests is stored for up to 100 years, while in others it's just stored for a couple years.
"What they do with it varies a lot, depending on the state. In many cases, though, they store those blood spots, and they may use them for all kinds of different research," she said. "Sometimes research into different newborn conditions, or they may use them to improve the accuracy of the newborn heel stick tests that they do."
Some Michigan parents recently sued, following in the path of other states where parents sued over privacy concerns. That led to Michigan agreeing to destroy more than 3 million of those blood spot tests that they had in storage.
"But there are millions more that are stored elsewhere. And those blood spots are still up in the air as it were and they're going to decide in a trial, what to do with those blood spots."
Hear more about the heel-stick test debate from Total Information AM:
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