Ethical, legal and health economic aspects of neonatal screening.
The spectrum of the title of this work is wide, but necessarily so, because of the increasing interaction of the three key components--ethics, law and health economy--in all parts of health systems. Although by nature the key components are different, they are still interdependent. Ethics, as the overall term for values, norms and attitudes of democratic societies, is the basic reference for our controlling of our personal lives, our lives with each other, and our lives with society institutions in the broadest sense. Ethics is the cambrium for control with our general behaviour, but is at the same time the cambrium for the control mechanisms of societies, as expressed in national laws. Health economics is often considered a necessary but value-free part of the spectrum, in accordance with money's very material nature. And yet economics and other resource elements (as organs for transplantation or numbers of special experts) have a strong link to ethics via so-called distributional ethics ("we are able to do more than we can afford"). The main theme for this introduction is ethics. In neonatal screening it relates to two different aspects: one linked to the neonate as an individual who can benefit from early diagnosis of treatable diseases, the other to the neonate as a member of a family line, enabling geneticists later to use the results for genetic mapping of a whole family or of large societal groups.
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Council of Europe, Protocol Group for Biomedical Research in Man, Hellerup, Denmark.
D003718:Denmark; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D015997:Neonatal Screening / Q000191:economics* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*