[ExI] good bexarotene article

[Stefano Vaj]

On 12 February 2012 00:46, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> I can think of reasons with regard to health insurance and life insurance.
> I can imagine cases where a person who thinks they have cancer might try to
> go anonymously to a medic and get it diagnosed, then figure out some way to
> not have their health insurance cancelled.  Or in the coming age in the US
> where we may be required to buy insurance, that information may be
> intentionally hidden.

Yes, did not think of that. Even though keeping silent on a condition
would void the contract, I appreciate that one would be willing to
give it a try.

> In any case, the medical records infrastructure as it exists in the US is
> all about patient privacy, with no regard to filtering out unexpected
> correlations between a medication and some unrelated disease.  ù

Yes, the same goes for Italy and continental Europe in general. If
anything, the alternative is between total opacity -  say, HIV
positive results - and compulsory report - say, firearm wounds. And
even when a National Health system would make it in principle easy to
collect abundant statistical data on any possible combination of
diseases, drugs, lifestyles, genetic makes, etc., very little if
anything is actually required or even encouraged.

Moreover, according to the EU directive on personal data processing,
the concept of "personal data" is not limited to data referring to
somebody's name, because anything that is "identifying" enough (and of
course any in-depth profiling of an individual would be...)
theoretically qualifies.

-- 
Stefano Vaj