History
Robert Guthrie is given much of the credit for pioneering the earliest screening for phenylketonuria in the late 1960s using blood samples on filter paper obtained by pricking a newborn baby's heel on the second day of life to get a few drops of blood. Congenital hypothyroidism was the second disease widely added in the 1970s. Guthrie and colleagues also developed bacterial inhibition assays for the detection of maple syrup urine disease and classic galactosemia. The development of tandem mass spectrometry screening in the early 1990s led to a large expansion of potentially detectable congenital metabolic diseases that can be identified by characteristic patterns of amino acids and acylcarnitines.
In the United States, the American College of Medical Genetics recommended a uniform panel of diseases that all infants born in every state should be screened for. They also developed an evidence based review process for the addition of conditions in the future. The implementation of this panel across the United States meant all babies born would be screened for the same number of conditions. Prior to this, babies born in different states had received different levels of screening. On April 24, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007. This act was enacted to increase awareness among parents, health professionals, and the public on testing newborns to identify certain disorders. It also sought to improve, expand, and enhance current newborn screening programs at the state level.
Read more about this topic: Newborn Screening
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)