The Verge - Healths |
| States pass laws limiting use of DNA searches for criminal investigations Posted: 01 Jun 2021 07:48 AM PDT  Maryland and Montana recently became the first states in the nation to pass laws limiting law enforcement's use of DNA databases to solve crimes. The strategy, sometimes called genetic genealogy, has been used to find dozens of people accused of violent crimes, including the Golden State Killer, but raises genetic privacy concerns. The laws focus on consumer DNA databases, which let people upload their genetic information and use it to connect with relatives. Over the past few years, law enforcement officers have started using the databases to track down suspects: they can upload DNA found at a crime scene and use matches with relatives to narrow their pool of suspects, and in some cases find the alleged criminal. Maryland legislation now requires law enforcement to get a judge's sign-off before using this technique, and limits it to crimes like murder, kidnapping, and human trafficking. It also says that investigators can only use databases that explicitly tell users that their information could be used to investigate crimes. In Montana, law enforcement would need a warrant before using a DNA database unless the users waived rights to privacy. The laws are an important step toward more robust genetic privacy standards, Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, told The New York Times. After genetic genealogy was used to identify the Golden State Killer in 2018, experts and privacy advocates noted that people uploading their information to genetic databases may not know that it could be used for a criminal investigation. Any relatives of people who upload information could also be unwittingly swept up in that net. It's not limited to immediate relatives, either: one study found that a database of around 1.3 million people could theoretically be used to identify around 60 percent of people with European ancestry in the United States. In response to those concerns, the databases GEDmatch — the one used to identify the Golden State Killer — and FamilyTreeDNA changed their terms to only allow law enforcement to use data from users who opted into those searches. But the opt-in settings are on by default. In December 2019, GEDmatch was acquired by a crime scene DNA company, making the relationship with law enforcement more explicit and frustrating genealogists who didn't want to see the service used for those purposes. As it stands, the new genetic genealogy legislation in Maryland and Montana may not be enough of an incentive for companies like GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA to change their existing policies around user consent. The companies told The New York Times that they have no plans to make changes at this time. Other companies, like Ancestry and 23andMe, already ask for a warrant before police officers can search their databases. Legislatures in Utah and Washington state have also proposed rules limiting the use of genetic genealogy: a Utah lawmaker introduced a bill in early 2020 banning the practice entirely, and Washington state legislators considered requiring law enforcement officers to get court orders to use genetic databases. Meanwhile, law enforcement continues using the technique to investigate crimes. Nevada detectives recently used GEDmatch to identify a victim and restart the investigation into his 1991 death, and a murder trial started last month for a man identified through GEDmatch.  |
| Climate change responsible for about a third of heat deaths, study says Posted: 31 May 2021 09:55 AM PDT  Heat is a killer — and climate change is driving up its body count. On average, about 37 percent of heat deaths can be tied back to human-caused climate change, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change. The study looked at data from 732 places in 43 countries over a period of about three decades, from 1991-2018. They used information including heat deaths and temperature readings from those places to build computer models that calculated how many deaths could be attributed to climate change. The numbers varied depending on location, with a larger percentage of climate-change related deaths occuring in warmer countries than cooler ones. Overall, about 166,000 people died of heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2017, according to the World Health Organization. Thanks to climate change, more people are being exposed to heatwaves than ever before. "Between 2000 and 2016, the number of people exposed to heatwaves increased by around 125 million," the WHO estimates. There is one notable limitation to this new study — while hundreds of locations were included, many areas of Africa and Southeast Asia were not, due to a lack of data. Gathering that information in the future will be vitally important for new efforts to create a global accounting of heat-related deaths and illnesses. "The countries where we do not have the necessary health data are often among the poorest and most susceptible to climate change, and, concerningly, are also the projected major hotspots of future population growth," climate change researcher Dann Mitchell wrote in an article accompanying the paper. "Obtaining these data will be key for science to provide the information needed to help these countries adapt." "We are thinking about these problems of climate change as something that the next generation will face," said Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera, the lead author of the paper in an interview with The New York Times. "It's something we are facing already. We are throwing stones at ourselves." That's in line with other research, which has found that climate change is already a disaster for human health. Older people, in particular, are particularly vulnerable, with heat-related deaths for this age group increasing by about 54 percent between 2000 and 2018. Some areas of the planet are getting hit worse than others, with extreme conditions happening even more frequently than predicted.  |
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