A recent lawsuit decided in U.S. district court in Atlanta, in which the case of a mystery pooper has real implications for the state of genetic privacy in the United States. Someone was dropping unauthorized packages in a warehouse that stored grocery-store products. So Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services, which owned the warehouse, asked some employees to undergo a cheek swab, to try to find a match to the DNA in the feces.
A pair of employees who were swabbed but were not a match filed a complaint under the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC initially dismissed their charges, but when they filed suit in the district court, the judges sided with the employees. Atlas ultimately had to pay $2.25 million in damages.
According to Nature, this was the first GINA case to go to trial since the law was enacted in 2008. Atlas tried to argue that the law didn’t apply in this case, because it wasn’t seeking medical information about its employees, just trying to find out who was pooping by the produce. Leaving aside that the mere fact someone is deliberately defecating outside a bathroom may signal some mental health issues, GINA says that it is “an unlawful employment practice for an employer to request, require, or purchase genetic information with respect to an employee.” (“Genetic information,” according to the statute, includes “genetic tests,” not necessarily limited just to ones that reveal medical information.)
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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Genetic Privacy, as Explained by Mystery Poopers
