Keyose Blog - Personal Health Records

Although privacy concerns are not still solved in the Personal Health Record universe the big ones of the IT industry are planning the next step: Personal Genome Projects.
The funded by google company 23andme offers the first Personal Genome Service online.
The idea is simple and apparently useful: you order a kit that is mailed to your home. You spit on a tube and send back the kit to the laboratory by mail.
Then you can access to the genomic code of that spit. That includes information about your genetic diseases, risk of having cancer, diabetes or multiple sclerosis.

Sounds great… right?

But wait a minute. What if a unauthorized person get access to the 23andme database? He will have a lot of information about many people. Ok, they can use strong encrypting algorithms but we know there is no 100% secure system. Maybe providing a anonymous service as Keyose this problem could be nearly totally prevented.

But this is not the only problem. Not at all!. What if I just take some of the spit of my new partner or my employee and send it to 23andme pretending to by my own spit? Then I could access to the genomic information of a third person without his/her permission. That sounds not really funny!

Maybe a enthusiastic biologist cannot foresee these kind of issues but for an active family physician like me the personal genomic information is not so “cool”. Some information stored online could be useful for healthcare. But more information than needed starts to become more dangerous than beneficial.