PUBLIC HEALTH AND GENETICS

联邦和州公共卫生机构多年来一直在提供遗传医学方面发挥作用。我们对遗传学对健康的贡献的理解的急剧增加，正在挑战这些机构改变他们在公共卫生遗传学方面的做法。公共卫生行动者应对这些挑战的能力既受到公共卫生遗传学方面广受赞誉的成功（如新生儿筛查）的影响，也受到目前更普遍的公共卫生角色发生的变化以及优生学的历史和过去公共遗传学项目中的失误的影响。该项目将探索当前努力构建公共卫生实践的广度，以应对遗传学的进步，分析这些努力与现有公共卫生法律和政策的一致性，以及它们对历史教训的回应。公共卫生机构在生殖基因检测、国营新生儿筛查项目和预测性基因检测方面的作用将得到特别强调。这一分析的结果将用于确定在公共卫生遗传学方面采用的新政策是否能最佳地满足公众的需要，如果不能，则提出需要改进的领域。

Federal and state public health institutions have for years played a role in the delivery of genetic medicine. Dramatic increases in our understanding of the contributions of genetics to health are challenging these institutions to change their practices in public health genetics. The ability of public health actors to meet these challenges is shaped both by widely acclaimed successes in public health genetics, such as newborn screening, and by changes currently taking place in the role of public health more generally and by the history of eugenics and past missteps in public programs in genetics. This project will explore the breadth of current efforts to structure public health practice to respond to advances in genetics, analyzing these efforts for their consistency with existing public health law and policy and for their responsiveness to the lessons of history. The roles of public health institutions in reproductive genetic testing, state-run newborn screening programs, and predictive genetic testing will receive particular emphasis. The results of this analysis will be used to determine whether the new policies being adopted in public health genetics optimally meet the needs of the public, and if not, to suggest areas for improvement.