Rite Aid Stores in West Selling a Paternity Test Kit

[CourtClerk]

What is the name of your state?

Rite Aid Stores in West Selling a Paternity Test Kit


By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: November 26, 2007
Genetic testing is now available at the drugstore. A company called Sorenson Genomics has started selling a paternity test kit through Rite Aid stores in California, Oregon and Washington. It appears to be the first time a DNA test is being sold through a major pharmacy chain.

The move into the pharmacy is another in the spread of genetic testing directly to consumers. Many genetic tests, for health and diet advice, ancestry and paternity, are already available directly to consumers through the Internet.

But Sorenson hopes the corner drugstore will appeal to different customers, including those who do not want to wait three or five days for a kit to arrive in the mail after ordering it over the Internet.

“There is a curiosity and a need to know that can be provided discreetly, conveniently and affordably at retail,” said Douglas R. Fogg, chief operating officer of Sorenson Genomics. The company’s slogan: “For questions only DNA can answer.”

The test, sold under the brand name Identigene, has a suggested list price of $29.99, though a reporter purchased one at a Rite Aid in Santa Monica, Calif., for $19.99. There is an additional laboratory fee of $119 to have the samples analyzed.

The spread of genetic testing directly to consumers has alarmed some doctors and genetic counselors, who said some tests were not valid or that consumers might not be able to understand the results without counseling.

Myriad Genetics recently caused some controversy by advertising its test for breast cancer risk directly to women in the Northeast. And the Government Accountability Office, among others, has criticized a plethora of tests now available for advising on health risks and recommending diet and lifestyle changes.

“Just because something’s available does not mean it’s safe or effective or worth your money,” said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. She said most genetic tests available directly to consumers had not been reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration.

Still, drugstores already sell various non-DNA diagnostic tests, including those for pregnancy, drug use, cholesterol, blood sugar and H.I.V. When some of these were introduced there was also controversy about whether consumers could perform the tests or understand the results themselves.

The results of a paternity test, unlike some of the medical tests, are pretty easy to understand.

The box contains three sets of cotton swabs to collect cheek samples from the child, the alleged father and the mother. (The mother is optional but helps strengthen the results, the company says.) The swabs are put into separate packets and mailed to Sorenson’s laboratory in Salt Lake City. Results are provided by mail, fax or on a password-protected Web site within five days of the laboratory receiving the samples.

Sorenson said the test was for peace of mind and that the results would probably not stand up in court because questions could be raised about whose samples were submitted. The kit advises people wanting to test for legal purposes to call the company and set up a chain of custody for the samples, which would cost an additional $200.

At least one other genetic test is sold in a drugstore. Sciona sells a $269 service that provides dietary advice based on genetic analysis through Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, a chain of 19 stores mainly in California and Colorado.

Rosalynn Gill, chief science officer of Sciona, said that Pharmaca, unlike most pharmacies, had dietitians on staff to help explain the purpose of the test to customers.

“It’s far too early to expect people to walk into a store and buy a genetic test directly off the shelf without some guidance or counsel,” she said. Still, Sciona gets most of its sales from the Internet and from multilevel marketing.

Mr. Fogg of Sorenson said the company now sold about 1,500 to 2,000 paternity tests a month through the Internet and hoped to increase that greatly through sales at drugstores. It hopes to expand to all Rite Aid stores and possibly other chains, he said. It also plans to begin advertising the test in stores, on the radio and possibly on television.

Ashley Flower, a spokeswoman for Rite Aid, would not comment other than to confirm that the kit was being sold in the three West Coast states.

Sorenson, which is bankrolled by a medical device entrepreneur, James LeVoy Sorenson, also offers ancestry testing. Mr. Fogg said he did not know if that test would be offered through drugstores.


What's the fallout going to be with this one???

 

[fairisfair]

What is the name of your state?

Rite Aid Stores in West Selling a Paternity Test Kit


By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: November 26, 2007
Genetic testing is now available at the drugstore. A company called Sorenson Genomics has started selling a paternity test kit through Rite Aid stores in California, Oregon and Washington. It appears to be the first time a DNA test is being sold through a major pharmacy chain.

The move into the pharmacy is another in the spread of genetic testing directly to consumers. Many genetic tests, for health and diet advice, ancestry and paternity, are already available directly to consumers through the Internet.

But Sorenson hopes the corner drugstore will appeal to different customers, including those who do not want to wait three or five days for a kit to arrive in the mail after ordering it over the Internet.

“There is a curiosity and a need to know that can be provided discreetly, conveniently and affordably at retail,” said Douglas R. Fogg, chief operating officer of Sorenson Genomics. The company’s slogan: “For questions only DNA can answer.”

The test, sold under the brand name Identigene, has a suggested list price of $29.99, though a reporter purchased one at a Rite Aid in Santa Monica, Calif., for $19.99. There is an additional laboratory fee of $119 to have the samples analyzed.

The spread of genetic testing directly to consumers has alarmed some doctors and genetic counselors, who said some tests were not valid or that consumers might not be able to understand the results without counseling.

Myriad Genetics recently caused some controversy by advertising its test for breast cancer risk directly to women in the Northeast. And the Government Accountability Office, among others, has criticized a plethora of tests now available for advising on health risks and recommending diet and lifestyle changes.

“Just because something’s available does not mean it’s safe or effective or worth your money,” said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. She said most genetic tests available directly to consumers had not been reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration.

Still, drugstores already sell various non-DNA diagnostic tests, including those for pregnancy, drug use, cholesterol, blood sugar and H.I.V. When some of these were introduced there was also controversy about whether consumers could perform the tests or understand the results themselves.

The results of a paternity test, unlike some of the medical tests, are pretty easy to understand.

The box contains three sets of cotton swabs to collect cheek samples from the child, the alleged father and the mother. (The mother is optional but helps strengthen the results, the company says.) The swabs are put into separate packets and mailed to Sorenson’s laboratory in Salt Lake City. Results are provided by mail, fax or on a password-protected Web site within five days of the laboratory receiving the samples.

Sorenson said the test was for peace of mind and that the results would probably not stand up in court because questions could be raised about whose samples were submitted. The kit advises people wanting to test for legal purposes to call the company and set up a chain of custody for the samples, which would cost an additional $200.

At least one other genetic test is sold in a drugstore. Sciona sells a $269 service that provides dietary advice based on genetic analysis through Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, a chain of 19 stores mainly in California and Colorado.

Rosalynn Gill, chief science officer of Sciona, said that Pharmaca, unlike most pharmacies, had dietitians on staff to help explain the purpose of the test to customers.

“It’s far too early to expect people to walk into a store and buy a genetic test directly off the shelf without some guidance or counsel,” she said. Still, Sciona gets most of its sales from the Internet and from multilevel marketing.

Mr. Fogg of Sorenson said the company now sold about 1,500 to 2,000 paternity tests a month through the Internet and hoped to increase that greatly through sales at drugstores. It hopes to expand to all Rite Aid stores and possibly other chains, he said. It also plans to begin advertising the test in stores, on the radio and possibly on television.

Ashley Flower, a spokeswoman for Rite Aid, would not comment other than to confirm that the kit was being sold in the three West Coast states.

Sorenson, which is bankrolled by a medical device entrepreneur, James LeVoy Sorenson, also offers ancestry testing. Mr. Fogg said he did not know if that test would be offered through drugstores.


What's the fallout going to be with this one???

hey copy cat, I posted that last week. LOL

I just hope they put them right next to the condoms.

 

[CJane]

What's the fallout going to be with this one???

We're going to have a billion more "I've been paying support for 15 years and just found out the kid isn't mine. Can I get a refund?" questions.



There's no instant gratification either, which seems to be what they're marketing. It takes 5 days from when they receive samples...

DNA testing for my son was through a lab, and my son's child support payor was swabbed on the 28th of one month, my son was swabbed on the 9th of the following month and on the 18th I had the results in my email along with a "How to read genetic testing results" attachment. Though how hard is it to understand "With a 99.91% certainty, X cannot be excluded as the father of BabyBoy."?

 

[nextwife]

Though how hard is it to understand "With a 99.91% certainty, X cannot be excluded as the father of BabyBoy."?

Hmmm. Labs CAN and do mess up. There was a case in which the lab techs were so swamped they showed the guy was 99.9 % certain to be dad, but the guy KNEW he'd not had sex with mom for several years prior to conception. He fought it all the way through the system, and eventually proved the lab had claimed he was the father, when the DNA did NOT actually match.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/20/AR2005082000998_pf.html

washingtonpost.com
Paternity Suit Raises Doubts About DNA Tests
Va. Judge Rejects Results, Questions Lab Work in Case of D.C. Hair Salon Owner

By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 21, 2005; C01

Washington hairdresser Andre Chreky gladly agreed to a DNA test when a former employee hit him with a paternity suit.

The claim was absurd, Chreky said he remembers thinking. He had stopped dating the woman years before she gave birth to the boy, now a teenager. This would all be over soon. DNA doesn't lie.

The results were back in a month, on a two-page report from Laboratory Corp. of America, or LabCorp, one of the largest paternity testers in the country and the state of Virginia's exclusive contractor: "The probability of paternity is 99.99 percent."

"It's crazy," Chreky, 50, who lives with his wife and two children in Great Falls, recalled saying. "We need to take this to battle."

The fight lasted two years. When it ended in May, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge David T. Stitt not only ruled in Chreky's favor, but also raised serious questions about the reliability of DNA testing during a time when it is relied on to prove paternity, guilt, innocence and more.

"I thought LabCorp's performance was shoddy," Stitt said at a hearing in May after ruling that the state did not prove Chreky was the father. "I think something unfair happened in this case, where a citizen was put to the greatest extent to defend himself against what really has turned out to be a moving target as far as where LabCorp is concerned. . . . I'm concerned about what level of oversight is being exercised by the commonwealth of LabCorp's work."

The state is not appealing Stitt's ruling.

LabCorp handles more than 100,000 DNA paternity tests for many public and private clients every year, including Montgomery, Prince George's, Howard and Anne Arundel counties in Maryland. (The District handles its own DNA testing.)
Laurence D. Mueller, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of California-Irvine who has been tracking lab errors in DNA cases for years, said DNA labs "use techniques that have been automated, like Hostess Twinkies on an assembly line. Most of the time, the Twinkies are fine. But once in a while, you see a bad one."

The bad ones, some biologists say, are coming more frequently.

On Friday, the state of Illinois fired its DNA lab, Fairfax County-based Bode Technology, for failing to detect semen in 11 out of 51 rape cases. State police said the errors had not wrongly freed or convicted anyone, but they said they would have to reanalyze evidence in 1,200 rape cases.

At a July murder trial in Michigan, prosecutors acknowledged that a DNA test on evidence from 1969 matched someone who would have been 4 years old at the time of the slaying and couldn't possibly have been involved. Additional tests led to a second man, who was convicted.

In Las Vegas in 2001, a man spent a year in jail after being wrongly accused of committing two sexual assaults in the 1990s. Investigators later found that his DNA sample had been switched with another inmate's.

Human error "has always existed in all of the forensic sciences," said William M. Shields, a professor at the State University of New York in Syracuse who has testified in numerous DNA cases. "It exists in all the sciences."

Brad Smith, a LabCorp spokesman, said criticism from the judge in Chreky's case appeared to be the result of "some good lawyering on the challenge side."

"We are confident that we reported the correct results and that we followed appropriate procedures and good science," he said.

Smith added that he had worked in the identity and paternity testing field since 1982 and that "we've never had a result like this and or a [judge's] statement like this."

Nathaniel L. Young Jr., director of the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement, which pursued Chreky's paternity, said in a statement that he could not comment on the case, but he said procedures are under review.

* * *

In the late 1990s, Andre Chreky already was a star hairstylist with his own salon. But he reached new heights after he was profiled in Washingtonian magazine and it became known that his clients included first lady Laura Bush. Soon after, Chreky said, a former receptionist began showing up at his shop on K Street NW, demanding money.

"You have a child," the woman, Adele Doudaklian, 43, of Gaithersburg, told him -- a teenage son he had never met. He ordered her out.

Doudaklian did not return phone calls to her home. Chreky said he dated her several times in the early 1980s but stopped long before Doudaklian's son, Andrew Lucas, was born in March 1986.

When the paternity action was brought in early 2003, Chreky said, he thought the DNA test would end the whole episode.

Instead, Chreky was ordered to pay $1,715 a month in child support, plus health insurance premiums, after LabCorp's report said he was the father. By the time Lucas turned 18, Chreky had paid $25,000. (Even after he won the case, Virginia law did not allow him to get the money back.)

Chreky pleaded his case to the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement and then in an appeal to Fairfax Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. But LabCorp's "99.99 percent" finding was too tough to overcome. In fact, under Virginia law, 98 percent is automatic proof of paternity.

This spring, his case landed in Fairfax County Circuit Court in a full-blown trial. Douglas S. Levy, one of Chreky's attorneys, said Chreky offered to take another DNA test before his trial. But the state rejected the offer, he said.

So Chreky's attorneys hammered LabCorp's experts, mostly about what the lawyers saw as two errors on the lab report. The director of LabCorp's DNA identification testing division, Gary M. Stuhlmiller, said in a sworn report that he had arrived at his conclusions after comparing Chreky's DNA with a database of the Moroccan population. Chreky is a native of Morocco.

But at trial, Stuhlmiller acknowledged that LabCorp did not have a Moroccan database.

Stuhlmiller's report also listed 11 columns of numbers. But at trial, Stuhlmiller acknowledged that 13 tests were run, not 11. He said two were "not reportable" because they did not work properly.

Mueller, who testified on Chreky's behalf, said LabCorp should have simply rerun the tests. Instead, LabCorp omitted the two remaining columns from its report. Stuhlmiller's report did not mention the omitted tests, which he acknowledged could have precluded Chreky as the father.

And then there was Stuhlmiller's workload. He told the judge he personally reviewed 30,000 paternity cases a year, working 10 hours a day with no lunch break, 40 weeks a year, with time away for training and vacation. "And that would be 15 [reports] an hour, is that right?" Chreky's lead attorney, Glenn C. Lewis, asked him.

"Correct," Stuhlmiller answered.

Stuhlmiller declined to comment, but Smith, the LabCorp spokesman, said focusing on Stuhlmiller ignored the time spent by other lab personnel compiling the data. "I don't think it's a fair representation of the amount of time or care that we spent to make sure that was a fair review," Smith said.

LabCorp has performed Virginia's paternity testing since 2001 and charges the state $39.50 per test, or about $120 per case. State statistics show LabCorp was paid $797,000 last year and did almost 20,000 tests. LabCorp began paternity testing in 14 of Maryland's 24 jurisdictions in October and had performed about 6,000 tests through July.

Stitt found LabCorp's "99.99 percent" report "not statistically valid." Combining that with his distrust of Doudaklian's testimony, Stitt ruled that the state had "failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Andre Chreky is the father of Andrew Lucas."

How could a judge discard a seemingly definitive DNA report? Experts said it was virtually unheard of.

But Mueller pointed to a number of incidents of lab error in recent years, including allegations of problems with crime labs in Houston and Richmond.

Crime labs in Philadelphia and Minnesota were later discovered to have sent out "false matches."

"It's a terribly important issue," Mueller said. "People involved in doing these techniques make mistakes that are not involved with technology. . . . Until you get humans out of the system, these things can happen."

Chreky is no scientist. He said he just knew that this was something he needed to fight. Most people don't have the means to contest a "99.99 percent" finding. His wife, Serena, said the couple spent more than $200,000 to fight the case.

Chreky said he spent much of the past three years overwhelmed with anxiety about the case. "I've been getting up at 3:30, sleeping a couple of hours a night," he said. "I tried to keep busy. You don't want to think about it."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

 

[CourtClerk]

hey copy cat, I posted that last week. LOL

Oops..sorry. I didn't see it.

I just hope they put them right next to the condoms.

How about line them up like this... condoms...pregnancy test...DNA test. If one fails or you fail to use one, please go the the next step...

I really don't see what the point is anyway. The tests are NOT admissable in court and really, the only ones I see purchasing them are those who have already blown the SOL to dispute paternity in court. So... you've spent $150 that you could have sent towards the CS you're going to have to pay, no matter what the results are anyway...

 

[CJane]

Hmmm. Labs CAN and do mess up. There was a case in which the lab techs were so swamped they showed the guy was 99.9 % certain to be dad, but the guy KNEW he'd not had sex with mom for several years prior to conception. He fought it all the way through the system, and eventually proved the lab had claimed he was the father, when the DNA did NOT actually match.

No one has said they can't or don't. Only that the people who are saying that people can't read the results w/out counseling or professional input are being more than a little silly.