EU is currently discussing changes to the European privacy laws. The intention is to strengthen the protection of privacy and to give people more control over their data.

The problem, which I highlighted on The Ethics Blog, is that the new proposal applies also to research. Presently there is an exception for scientific research about health and disease. The proposed revision of the privacy regulation, however, allows no exceptions.

Every person who has given data to a register must according to the new proposal be asked for consent each time researchers want to study some new disease pattern. Patient data can never be used in research without specific consent, and not even historical registers and data from diseased persons are given exception in the new proposal.

A recent article in Nature Reviews Genetics by Deborah Mascalzoni et al. highlights a patient group that is especially vulnerable to the proposed revision: patients suffering from rare diseases. In Sweden a disease is defined as rare if it affects less than a hundred persons in a million.

Data on rare diseases are, as a matter of course, rare. We therefore know little about these diseases and it is difficult to develop effective medical treatments. To achieve statistically significant analyses, researchers must typically share data over national borders. Every lost piece of data about rare diseases can mean dramatically impaired prospects of new drugs and treatments for these patient groups.

Rare diseases are thus a further strong reason for maintaining the current exception for scientific research in the data protection legislation. Read more on the CRB website.

Pär Segerdahl

Approaching future issues - the Ethics Blog