Who's the daddy? US sperm banks must be better regulated
By Alison Motluk,
New Scientist
| 08. 09. 2007
CAREFUL,
exacting, high-tech - that's the image US sperm banks like to project
to their customers. They run limited genetic tests on their donors and
trace medical records back three generations. They also screen for
chemical exposure, drug use and even do complex psychological profiling.
Equally
interesting is what sperm banks don't do - and are not required to do
by law. They don't verify that all the medical or personal information
that donors give them is correct. They don't routinely test for the
majority of known genetic diseases. They do not confirm that the sperm
the woman requested is the sperm that ends up in her body. And they
don't always know where to find donors or recipient families should a
concern crop up.
Now
a small, not-for-profit company is beginning to fill in these gaps. In
doing so, it threatens to expose just how common errors in the American
fertility industry might be, and how little oversight exists to stop
these problems from happening or to deal with them if they do occur.
In January this year, the...
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