According to research by The Associated Press, several of mankind’s most devastating inherited diseases appear to be in decline or have nearly disappeared entirely. The cause is believed to be related to increased use of genetic testing by people deciding whether or not to have children.

The Associated Press found from interviews with numerous geneticists and other experts and a review of available research that births of babies with cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs and other less familiar disorders seem to have dropped since testing has come into wider use.

“We’re definitely seeing decreased rates of certain genetic disorders as a result of carrier screening,” said Dr. Wendy Chung, clinical genetics chief at Columbia University. In five years, she has seen only one case of Tay-Sachs, a neurological disease that used to be more common in Ashkenazi, or Eastern European Jews.

While the decrease in births of children with debilitating disease is widely lauded, some caution that working to completely eliminate disease, “should give us pause.” Barron Lerner, a Columbia University medical historian, wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. “If a society is so willing to screen aggressively to find these genes and then to potentially to have to abort the fetuses, what does that say about the value of the lives of those people living with the diseases?”

Source: Washington Post