I want my DNA!

Its February - the month of love! That means lots of hearts, which pump blood, which is collected by pricking the heel of your baby when they're a few hours old. Yeah, its a stretch.. stay with me. Newborn screening is performed on all newborns to test for a variety of genetic disorders, many of which cause serious problems (mental retardation, death) if they aren't detected early. And while a baby may look perfectly healthy when you take it home from the hospital, it may actually have some life-threatening disorder. If you want to know more, you can click HERE.

Maybe you read this article yesterday on CNN about how the big bad government is keeping your baby's DNA so that years down the road they can deny him/her insurance coverage and keep them from living the American Dream because they carry some random genetic disorder.

I'm sorry, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I don't buy into this. The state of South Carolina has a little dot of Kate's DNA sitting right downstairs in a freezer and I haven't yet lost any sleep over it. Maybe you don't know this about scientists, but they are deathly afraid to throw anything away... you know, just in case! Throw that culture of Salmonella away?! No! What if we need it in 6 months? To which my question is... "when was the last time you pulled something out of the freezer 6 months later?" and the answer is usually... "well, we did once back in 1978." Exactly. And what if you didn't have it to pull out? The patient is either better or dead at that point, so its good to have, but isn't critical.

As an FYI, the SC state lab is hoping to change legislation so that we can throw them away shortly after testing. Why keep the spots? Well, with scientists in charge, there's always just in case... just in case we need to do more research, just in case we get sued and need to re-test.

Ok, if you made it through that, here's a photo of Kate riding an alligator to brighten your day!