Should Children Be Tested to Find Diseases?

Testing from Infancy Gives Helpful Insight

By Kenzie Christensen

For years, tests have provided our nation with necessary information to get through life. These tests allow us to better understand what goes on around us and why, and they can make our lives much easier. There is nothing wrong with these tests, and they aren’t harmful to people in any way. A new study is focusing on babies and their lives into adulthood. This study will give us vital information in a healthy way.

The University of Utah and Primary Children’s Hospital are collaborating in the National Children’s Study. This study will collect blood and urine samples, medications taken, TV programs watched, food eaten, and other lifestyle habits from more than 1,200 children from birth to age 21 to see how environmental influences affect children in ways of health and other things, according to the “Salt Lake Tribune.”

The doctors hope to eventually be in the process of testing over 100,000 babies around the country, with 1,250 participating in Salt Lake County. This study will be very beneficial in many different ways.

The study will allow doctors and other professionals to really understand how lifestyle choices and overall health affect people. It is more complete than most other studies which focus mainly on one age group and one point of life. This study allows the whole picture to be seen. And by starting at birth, it can really provide a larger scope of how diseases begin.

The start of the study is fueled by increasing rates in childhood diseases such as obesity, diabetes, autism, asthma, and others, according to the University of Utah Healthcare website (www.healthcare.utah.edu).

Also, the study will include how our community, environment and genes act together to affect children.

This study will further allow doctors to understand why these diseases are occurring more often, in children especially. By starting these studies at birth, every factor can be taken into account and doctors can really see how much of these things affect children, and how they affect them.

New Study Violates Children’s Privacy

By Heidi Stromberg

The National Children’s Study is the federal government’s new method of observing how genes and the environment interact to affect the health of children. Participants will be observed from before their birth until adulthood, a span of 21 years or more, according to the National Children’s Study website (www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov). That’s 21 years of doctor’s office visits, stool sampling, and having researchers hanging over the participants’ shoulders, breathing down their necks.

Although this study may lead to important discoveries, it is in fact a violation of the participant’s privacy. Participants in this study, who were signed up by their parents before they were born, are going to be observed by researchers for the first two decades of life. Not a constant, 24-hour-surveillance kind of observing, but it might as well be. Children won’t be able to lead absolutely normal lives with researchers dropping by to collect blood, urine, and hair samples, and to ask their parents what kind of TV shows they have been watching or what food they have been eating.

Not only will they be periodically poked and prodded for the first 21 years of their lives, but the results of the tests will be made public. Each time the child/young adult reaches a “developmental milestone,” the researchers behind the study will publish the tests’ results, and their conclusions up to that point, according to the National Children’s Study website.

What the researchers have failed to say about their study is that perhaps it will have negative effects on the participants. Being tested, and having their lives recorded for everyone to read might make them feel like they live in a fish bowl. There could be a variety of unforeseen psychological effects.

“A lot of it depends on how the parents approach it,” said Anita Nielsen, RHS school psychologist. “[Though] it would be a pain to have to go to the doctor’s [to get the tests done] as a kid.”

Researchers hope to discover clues to what brings about childhood diseases and illnesses. But by performing this study, they are plaguing the privacy of thousands of children across the U.S.