discovering birth-defects early
Genetic Screening/Testing allows parents to have accurate determination as to whether or not their child will have a genetic disease. For example parents concerned that their children will inherit Huntington’s Disease can have a 95% accurate determination carried out to discover if their child has inherited the disease. Discovering this early on gives the parents an opportunity to discuss and plan ahead as to what action it is that they want to take, for example they can now decide to have the child aborted if they believe that it will be more humane that way or they can decide that they still want to raise the child but either way they now have the knowledge and the ability to prepare whereas without Genetic Screening/Testing they would not.
A microscopic image of part of the process of Huntington’s Disease:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neuron_with_mHtt_inclusion.jpg
eradicating inherited diseases
In the future, extending the uses of Genetic Screening/Testing to removing inherited diseases is a distinct possibility. The method of completing this would be to genetically test all unborn children, conceived by parents where one or both are either infected or carriers, and then only keep/give birth to the children who were not infected. In affect this would remove the specific disease from continuing within the family affected and eventually possibly completely removing the disease. But the main problem with this being the debate over is it ethical to play god in this situation?
Above left is a pedigree chart showing Huntington’s disease. It is clearly shown in this chart that the offspring that were born without the disease reproduce offspring that also do not have the disease. Below it is the same pedigree chart but changed to show what it would look like if the original parents had genetically tested their children and only had ones that did not carry the disease.
IDENTIFYING DISEASES EARLY
Identifying diseases early on can be extremely beneficial to the person being tested/screened, for example people who have diseases such as breast cancer but don’t know about it, or there have been no symptoms for it, would be able to discover early on that they do in fact have the disease and how and in which way they wish to act on it. The later on that a person knows that they have breast cancer the lower the chances of survival are and with the use Genetic Screening more lives can be saved.
Graph of deaths caused by breast cancer from 1971-2010. From this we can see that there is a decline in deaths as technology develops. Although obviously Genetic Screening is not the only reason there has been a decline in deaths it is still a large factor.