Latest news with #genetictesting
Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
We always joked dad looked nothing like his parents - then we found out why
Matthew's dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes. There was a running joke in his family that "dad looked nothing like his parents", the teacher from southern England says. It turned out there was a very good reason for this. Matthew's father had been swapped at birth in hospital nearly 80 years ago. He died late last year before learning the truth of his family history. Matthew - not his real name - contacted the BBC after we reported on the case of Susan, who received compensation from an NHS trust after a home DNA test revealed she had been accidentally switched for another baby in the 1950s. BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing. During the pandemic, Matthew started looking for answers to niggling questions about his family history. He sent off a saliva sample in the post to be analysed. The genealogy company entered his record into its vast online database, allowing him to view other users whose DNA closely matched his own. "Half of the names I'd just never heard of," he says. "I thought, 'That's weird', and called my wife to tell her the old family joke might be true after all." Matthew then asked his dad to submit his own DNA sample, which confirmed he was even more closely related to the same group of mysterious family members. Matthew started exchanging messages with two women who the site suggested were his father's cousins. All were confused about how they could possibly be related. Working together, they eventually tracked down birth records from 1946, months after the end of World War Two. The documents showed that one day after his father was apparently born, another baby boy had been registered at the same hospital in east London. That boy had the same relatively unusual surname that appeared on the mystery branch of the family tree, a link later confirmed by birth certificates obtained by Matthew. It was a lightbulb moment. "I realised straight away what must have happened," he says. "The only explanation that made sense was that both babies got muddled up in hospital." Matthew and the two women managed to construct a brand new family tree based on all of his DNA matches. "I love a puzzle and I love understanding the past," he says. "I'm quite obsessive anyway, so I got into trying to reverse engineer what had happened." Before World War Two, most babies in the UK were born at home, or in nursing homes, attended by midwives and the family doctor. That started to change as the country prepared for the launch of the NHS in 1948, and very gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries. "The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife. "It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well." It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today. To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight. "Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen", says Ms Coates, who trained as a nurse herself in the 1970s and a midwife in 1981. "If there were two or more members of staff in the nursery feeding babies, for example, a baby could easily be put down in the wrong cot." By 1956, hospital births were becoming more common, and midwifery textbooks were recommending that a "wrist name-tape" or "string of lettered china beads" should be attached directly to the newborn. A decade later, by the mid-1960s, it was rare for babies to be removed from the delivery room without being individually labelled. Stories of babies being accidentally switched in hospital were very rare at the time, though more are now coming to light thanks to the boom in genetic testing and ancestry websites. The day after Jan Daly was born at a hospital in north London in 1951, her mother immediately complained that the baby she had been given was not hers. "She was really stressed and crying, but the nurses assured her she was wrong and the doctor was called in to try to calm her," Jan says. The staff only backed down when her mum told them she'd had a fast, unassisted delivery, and pointed out the clear forceps marks on the baby's head "I feel for the other mother who had been happily feeding me for two days and then had to give up one baby for another," she says. "There was never any apology, it was just 'one of those silly errors', but the trauma affected my mother for a long time." Matthew's father, an insurance agent from the Home Counties, was a keen amateur cyclist who spent his life following the local racing scene. He lived alone in retirement and over the last decade his health had been deteriorating. Matthew thought long and hard about telling him the truth about his family history but, in the end, decided against it. "I just felt my dad doesn't need this," he says. "He had lived 78 years in a type of ignorance, so it didn't feel right to share it with him." Matthew's father died last year without ever knowing he'd been celebrating his birthday a day early for the past eight decades. Since then, Matthew has driven to the West Country to meet his dad's genetic first cousin and her daughter for coffee. They all got on well, he says, sharing old photos and "filling in missing bits of family history". But Matthew has decided not to contact the man his father must have been swapped with as a baby, or his children – in part because they have not taken DNA tests themselves. "If you do a test by sending your saliva off, then there's an implicit understanding that you might find something that's a bit of a surprise," Matthew says. "Whereas with people who haven't, I'm still not sure if it's the right thing to reach out to them - I just don't think it's right to drop that bombshell." Woman contacted by stranger on DNA site - and the truth about her birth unravelled Swapped at birth: How two women discovered they weren't who they thought they were Canadians switched at birth get an apology 70 years on
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Bankruptcy Was Good for 23andMe
Sometimes a public company has a controlling shareholder who wants to take it private by buying out all of the other shareholders, and that's always messy. 1 The controlling shareholder will to some extent be negotiating with herself: She will want to buy the company for a low price, but the company's shareholders will want to get a high price, but she's the controlling shareholder and can vote for the low price. There are standard solutions to the problem, but they are only partial solutions: In the past few months, I have written a few times about 23andMe Holding Co. as an illustration of these problems. 23andMe is a publicly traded genetic testing company that was once worth about $6 billion, but it has now fallen on hard times. Its founder, Anne Wojcicki, owns about 49% of the voting power of the stock, making her effectively a controlling shareholder. She offered to buy all the stock she didn't own, to take the company private and fix its problems 'outside of the short term pressures of the public markets.' But the board of directors, whose job was to find an 'actionable proposal that is in the best interests of the non-affiliated shareholders,' didn't think her offer was good enough.
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Nottinghamshire families left unaware of babies' blood test results in second NHS error
Hundreds of families in Nottinghamshire have potentially been left unaware of whether their babies may be carriers of certain genetic blood disorders, the second such NHS error to come to light since the start of this year. About 300 families whose children were born between 2004 and September 2024 in Bassetlaw and mid-Nottinghamshire were identified by the NHS as being affected. Changes in how genetic testing results were communicated to families meant they may not have been informed of whether their child was a carrier of a trait for sickle cell disease or for an unusual haemoglobin gene. NHS England said it has contacted the families affected directly by letter so that they understand what being a carrier means for them and their children. The NHS has also said that since the error, changes have been made to the way blood results are communicated within the area to make it more robust. Nottingham University hospital's local haemoglobinopathy team is now delivering the screening result for sickle cell carrier status to parents of children in the whole of Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. Previously, this sickle cell notification pathway only covered the city and the south of the county. Sickle cell disease primarily affects people from an African-Caribbean background. Testing for the sickle cell trait is important because although carriers do not have sickle cell disease symptoms, there is evidence they have additional medical needs, such as if they need an anaesthetic. The sickle cell trait may affect women during pregnancy, and carriers can experience pain during intense physical activity and at high altitudes, research suggests. If two parents carry the sickle cell trait, there is a one in four chance their children will have sickle cell anaemia. In January, the Guardian reported that an error by the NHS led to more than 800 families in Derbyshire not receiving the results of a heel prick test given to babies after birth, meaning they did not know whether their child was a carrier of a trait for sickle cell disease or for an unusual haemoglobin gene. NHS officials apologised 'wholeheartedly' to the families affected, saying the error 'shouldn't have happened' and that an investigation had been launched. John James, the chief executive of the Sickle Cell Society, said: 'It is unacceptable that, once again, families have not been informed of their children's newborn screening results. The fact that this issue has now emerged in another area, over a 20-year period, highlights a catastrophic weakness in the NHS's system for communicating test results – with distressing consequences for parents and individuals who remain unaware of this vital information. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion 'While these individuals do not have sickle cell disorder, knowing they carry the trait is crucial for their long-term health and wellbeing, and for making informed decisions about their future, particularly as some will now be old enough to consider having a family of their own. 'We welcome the NHS's efforts to resolve the situation in Nottinghamshire, but we are calling on those responsible to provide reassurance that processes in all other areas of England are robust and fit for purpose. It should not take repeated failures for basic procedures to be fixed. Getting screening right isn't optional – it's essential.' An NHS spokesperson said: 'We are sorry that we failed to inform some families in Bassetlaw and mid-Nottinghamshire that their children were carrying the sickle cell or unusual haemoglobin genes immediately following the results being available. We are putting in place a robust process to make sure this does not happen again.'
