PKU registry opens to the police – Today’s Medicine

Perhaps the PKU register opened for “investigation purposes”. Photo: Thinkstock

The registry is there for medical purposes, and under current legislation, the data from the register is not used, for example, criminal investigations, something the government now wants to review.

– We have not put our foot down on the merits, says Justice Minister Morgan Johansson said.

the directives to the investigator says that this is to analyze and submit proposals about “the use of tissue samples from the PKU biobank and other biobanks should be allowed for the investigation of serious crimes.”

the issue is controversial, because the DNA of all Swedes born in 1975 or later are in the registry.

the matter came to a head in 2003 when the then Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was murdered, the police managed to identify the killer Mijailo Mijailovic with using blood samples from PKU register. Despite protests from health care downloaded police samples from the registry. After a few years, it was time again, when Västerbotten police wanted out DNA samples from the suspect Lindgren, something Karolinska University Hospital – where the samples were stored – refused to join in.

– To my knowledge it has never happened to police collected the samples from the registry, not since the murder of Anna Lindh. Then Biobank new, but now there is a practice that there must be a court order, but so far as I know it has never happened that the samples were taken out, says Lene Sørensen, Deputy biobank responsible for PKU samples.

She think that any use of the samples for investigation of crimes is problematic.

– the registry is a trust issue. The risk is that the registry will be less complete if the police can collect samples.

PKU registry is not searchable register. In the case of Anna Lindh’s killer was only when the police had the name of a suspect who they got the use of the registry. From Mijailo Mijailovic PKU test it established a DNA profile was compared with DNA from the murder weapon and got hit.

PKU register is also used by a temporary change of biobank law in the identification of the Swedes who died in the tsunami in Southeast Asia on 26 december 2004. Although there knew one of the persons you would seek out the PKU test.

the registry is not available to criminal investigators include criticized by police officers who work with old unsolved murder. But no official comment would not leave the police authority for the investigation.

PKU register a research purposes and aims among other things to track in the current situation 24 different diseases. Original purpose was to track the disease PKU, a metabolic disorder.

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