Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Sue-ying (黃淑英) and the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR) yesterday urged the Department of Health to stop collecting human blood samples for the Taiwan Biobank project until relevant laws are passed.
The Department of Health initiated the project to collect blood samples from 200,000 people for research into the connection between human genes and diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular ailments. The Academia Sinica is implementing the project.
While agreeing that the project had a positive objective, Huang and the TAHR said the data could be put to inappropriate use without a set of written regulations, thus violating participants’ human rights.
“Since there is no law regulating how researchers are supposed to use the samples, how do we know if they won’t be used for non-medical purposes, such as commercial use?” Huang said at a news conference at the legislature.
TAHR chairman Lin Chia-fan (林佳範) condemned an ethics committee at Academia Sinica for approving the project.
“As there’s neither a law nor a consensus, the ethics committee should not simply make a decision via a vote,” Lin said.
Around 1,000 people in Tainan and Chiayi have already given blood samples.
Huang said the research team might have deceived the public by disguising the project as a medical examination.
“If you look at the poster for the project, would you think that your blood sample was being collected for a biological database?” Huang said while pointing to a poster.
The poster reads: “It takes you and me together to make our next generation healthier.” On the bottom of the poster, it says that participants will be tested for body fat, heart rate, blood pressure and bone density while blood and urine samples will be collected.
“More than 53 percent of people who already took part in the project thought they were having a medical examination,” Huang said, citing figures from the Academia Sinica.
When questioned by Huang during a question-and-answer session at the legislature, Department of Health Minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) said that he wasn’t aware of the project, but agreed with Huang.
“The sample collection should be stopped if it violates human rights,” Yeh said.
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