Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
August 1, 2000, Tuesday, Final Edition
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A22; LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
LENGTH: 271 words
HEADLINE:
Privacy Can Be Harmful to Your Health
BODY:
The July 13 front-page story "Cancer Study Deemphasizes Genes' Role"
left unasked the question of why in recent decades definitive studies about the
effects of various foodstuffs, vitamins, nutritional supplements, environmental
or other agents on health have often emanated from Scandinavia.
The
answer is that those countries maintain birth-to-death, data-rich registries of
their populations, which are accessible to health research. This enables
investigators to test their hypotheses on unbiased population samples and to
avoid arriving at misleading conclusions that confuse the public, distort public
policy and lead to public health recommendations that are costly and
unwarranted.
Our society is roiled by concerns about personal privacy,
particularly the privacy of medical information. But archived medical
information constitutes a historical record of the human experience of disease
and represents an irreplaceable library that medical researchers must be able to
enter. Without that access, it would be impossible for scientists to continue to
study the causes and expressions of human diseases, their responses to therapy
or the effectiveness of preventive strategies.
In searching for
solutions to legitimate privacy concerns, we must take care not to devise
solutions that in the name of protecting medical information
privacy would impair the integrity or accessibility of medical
archives, and thereby blunt medical research that benefits all of us.
DAVID KORN
Senior Vice President
Biomedical and Health
Sciences Research
Association of American Medical Colleges
Washington
LOAD-DATE: August 01, 2000
