Last Wednesday, the Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases, part of the Albert Einstein Medical Center, worked with the University of Pennsylvania’s Hillel, to bring a free testing to the area’s Jewish students. Students came to Steinhardt Hall for blood tests that will tell them if they are carriers for any of 10 genetic diseases common to Ashkenazi Jews. Carriers are not infected with the disease but can pass it on to their children; two people who are carriers of the same disease have a one in four chance of having an child infected with the disease. The ten diseases they test for are: Bloom syndrome, Canavan disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Familial Dysautonomia, Fanconi anemia, Gaucher disease, Type 1a Glycogen storage disorder, Mucolipidosis Type IV, Niemann-Pick disease, and Tay-Sachs disease. On what comes after testing, Student Coordinator of the screening, Brian Cohen says,

If they happen to be a carrier, the genetic counselor first of all, helps them to understand what it means to be a carrier. You’re still a healthy individual, there is no possibility that you will become infected with the disease if you’re just a carrier of it; the possibility all has to do with you’re children. So they let you know, obviously, that when you find a significant other and want to get married, you should have them get screened as well, and if you’re both a carrier of the same disease, they’ll let you know you’re options. If you don’t want to have kids the regular way, I suppose you could adopt. You could do invitro fertilization, where you get healthy sperm, healthy egg, and implant it into the mother, or if you’re comfortable doing it, you can do testing in the eight cell stage and if you find the child is infected with the disease you can have an abortion. There’s probably other options; I’m not familiar with all of them.

In preparation for the event, Hillel hosted a fundraiser at Strikes Bowling Alley, and an information session to inform students about the event. Cohen says students from both Temple and Drexel come to the event to get screened, after hearing about the event through word of mouth. The program has been growing over the years; in it’s first year, 2000, twenty people came to get screened, and four years later 80 people came to get screened. Then last March the event screened 180 people, and this year, with still an hour and a half left, around a hundred people have been screened. Cohen says they are currently trying to expand the program, which is also at the University of Pittsburgh and Tufts University, to the University of Maryland, and have been struggling to bring screenings to both Drexel and Temple, and hope to have it on both campuses by next spring.

Photos courtesy of Brian Cohen.