Dan McCue reports on a case in Illinois:
Surrogate parents of newborn triplets claim a hospital and major media outlets violated medical privacy laws and subjected them to “humiliation, embarrassment and emotional distress” by publishing photos and stories about their newborns. The parents say they never gave Advocate Christ Medical Center permission to release personal information about them or their babies, nor did they agree that the Sun Times, Tribune Co. or WLS-TV could photograph and publish the babies’ pictures.
Read more about the lawsuit on Courthouse News, where you can also read a copy of the complaint. I e-mailed the plaintiff’s lawyer yesterday to inquire as to whether a HIPAA complaint had also been filed, but I have not received any response as yet.
Rachel Gross reports:
UC Berkeley will go ahead with its controversial DNA testing program for freshmen, but with one key change: students won’t receive personal analyses of the three genes being tested. Instead, professors will lecture on the politics of personalized medicine and the results of the data as a whole.
The change was necessitated by a California Department of Health decision today mandating that the testing be done only in specific state-certified laboratories. But it’s too late in the game for the program to secure such a lab, said the university’s dean of Biological Sciences, Mark Schlissel.
Read more on Berkeleyside.
Jeff Gorman of Courthouse News reports:
An emergency medical technician was not required to report his suspicions that a co-worker had sexually molested a suicidal teenage girl in the back of their ambulance, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled.
Timothy O’Connell was the driver, and Matt DiFillippo was the EMT in the back.
O’Connell did report the suspicions to his supervisor, but the victim’s father alleged that O’Connell was required to make a report according to the state’s child protection law.
[...]
“We wish to emphasize that the absence of a statutory duty … to report this wrongdoing to child protective services does not impact the propriety or alleviate the moral obligation of contacting law enforcement to seek an investigation of such reprehensible criminal conduct,” Judge Michael Talbot wrote
The court’s opinion can be found here (pdf).
Moral obligation? I think the folks in Michigan need to get real. Unless they mandate EMT’s as reporters, any EMT considering making such a report would almost certainly consider whether they might have any liability for reporting if the report turned out to be unfounded. Not only could they be sued for libel or slander, but they could potentially be sued for a privacy or HIPAA violation by the patient. I don’t know if such lawsuits could prevail, but if the state really wants them to report suspicions of abuse, cover them by providing them with the same immunity for reporting that mandated reporters get.
A timely reminder that ID theft can have significant medical consequences.
Ronald Mortensen reports:
In March 2010, the Utah state legislature passed SB251 which requires all employers with 15 or more employees to protect children from illegal alien driven, job-related identity theft by using a status verification system such as E-Verify.
SB251 enters into effect on July 1, 2010 which is too late to protect an 11 month old Utah child who is the victim of identity theft.
Monica Zamora Vazquez, 28, an illegal alien, was arrested for using the identity of the child to get a job. She faces charges of identity fraud, theft by deception and possession of a forged writing device. These are felonies.
The 11 month old victim of the crime had been denied taxpayer funded medical assistance to help pay for treatment for heart problems because Ms. Vazquez was earning income under the victim’s Social Security number.
Read more on Examiner.com
Victoria Fletcher reports:
Blood samples from millions of newborn babies are being stored without their parents’ knowledge, it emerged yesterday.
The massive DNA files can be consulted by a range of organisations including the police, coroners and medical researchers, without having to ask the children’s families.
In a sinister example of Britain’s slide into a Big Brother society, hospitals have admitted storing the blood samples of four million newborns during routine heel-prick tests.
Read more in the Daily Express.
Thanks to the reader who sent in this link.
Comments (0) 
Themocracy