"Once you've said it's personal information for children that requires consent, you've set the framework for a requirement of consent to be applied to another population," Mr. Friel said.
The requirement of consent is necessarily implied.
The rules were changed a year ago to eliminate the requirement of consent to release health information for the purposes of treatment, payment and health care operations.
The argument drawn from the lack of an express requirement of consent to be sued is inconclusive.
"The ministry took a decision that, subject to [the] Forest Rights Act, there will not be requirement of consent of each of the gram sabhas through which such linear projects such as roads, canals, pipelines, transmission towers etc pass," said Natarajan.
But he says that this requirement of consent is satisfied when a majority of the representatives of property holders consent to the regulation and taxation of property (Locke, 1690, sec. 140).
"This case raises new questions, since there is no precedence for consent for cell line research, and there is no precedent for requirement of consent by relatives in genome sequencing".
Requirement of consent was waived for the control group.
The requirement of "consent", which is a feature of judicial precedents, is satisfied, but the problem of how the "genetic" relationship should be viewed remains to be solved.
The study was approved by the hospital's institutional review board (IRB) and ethics committee (Domain Specific Review Board, National Healthcare Group ref: 2011/01647) and requirement of consent was waived.
