When They Warn of Rare Disorders, These Prenatal Tests Are Usually Wrong

nytimes.com

7 points·cyberlurker··5 comments

Perhaps someone will make this point better (or point out my error) but I wanted to make a pithy observation:

Elizabeth Holmes is being prosecuted for hurting investors, these companies should be prosecuted for hurting people. They won’t be.

The prenatal tests are accompanied by trained advice and usually demand more tests before action. Almost all good tests have higher false positive than false negative and it is often said if you get a positive on a 1 in 1000 chance the first thing you do is repeat.

A principle of the legal system as I understand it is that you don't base trial for case B on unrelated case A -each trial happens on its own merits.

As it happens Holmes did harm people. The case they've chosen to fight is the one they can win.

If each case is reviewed on its own merits, then what is case law

"Because Holmes is being tried other diagnostic companies should be tried" is what I am trying to comment on.

Case law is applicable to a case under trial (as I understand it) because it provides you with judgement-based decision logic from prior analogous cases. It's not "because we tried A we should now try B" it's "the last time we tried something like B, the applicable judgement was from analogous trial A" but the decision to try B has to be made on it's own merits, not just because trial A happened.

IANAL btw

The harm is the stress. I know amniocentesis is commonly performed afterwards, but these companies are grossly over promising the accuracy of their prenatal tests. Waiting weeks to “confirm” you will be advised to terminate, only to discover the result was a false positive is harm when it happens in 80% of tests! That’s terrible.

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