Our health sold at 26 cents here is the business of thieves ... - The Republic

The investigation: who spy / 5. From the U.S. to Italy, assault to the data. “Offered ACASE pharmaceutical and insurance”

by ETTORE Livini, VALERIA PINES, IRENE MARIA SCALISE MILAN – 007, gall bladder operation. The Cold War is over, the lights have learned to recycle. And in a world where health is priceless and diseases are worth gold, the new frontier of Big Brother is the theft of the web (and sale) of all the most intimate secrets of our health. The health systems of the world – has admitted a few months ago in an alarming bulletin the Department to American security – are vulnerable to a sieve “that jeopardizes health and privacy of citizens.” Into Someone’s already noticed: the market – black, but not only – it is full of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and lawyers prepared to pay handsomely (in some cases under the table) the values ??of our blood pressure, the list of medicines that we take our curriculum and failure. Objective: To deny us life insurance policie s or assumptions, propose miracle cures or send ad hoc publicity if we are hypertensive or hemophiliacs. Where there is demand, it is an old law of capitalism, check the offer: and so from 2009 to today – calculates the Office of Civil Rights U.S. – diseases of the thieves got their hands on the medical records of more than 22 million Americans. How? By entering illegally into the databases of hospitals, stealing laptops and even intercepting (it happens more and more often) wireless data transmitted to doctors from defibrillators and insulin pumps implanted under the skin.

The loot, given the prices

currents, it is potentially billionaire. The medical record – strictly anonymous – a single patient of diabetes or cancer is worth 26 cents on the legitimate market (rate of Leadplease. Com according to the Financial Times ), discounted to € 0.14 for those who buy wholesale from 50 to 100 thousand. These figures in the gray area of ??l awlessness – where in the file, in addition to health data is a valuable commodity such as name, surname and address of the person – you can multiply by 10. Laurie Napper – lab technician at Howard University Hospital in Washington – has just been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for selling semi-complete data of 40 patients at $ 2100, $ 52.5 each. The temptation is strong. And even in Australia the Government was forced to stop in the area Cesarini the project for the national electronic health card (the doctor identikit of every citizen) after that only in the experimental phase were recorded over a thousand suspected intrusion in a computer system, in theory, supposed to be bombproof.

No wonder. “The information of this type are the currency of the future,” said Ken candid Riff Medtronic. To serve the pharmaceutical industry to save big on research, evaluate drugs that doctors prescribe and plan marketing strategies and advertising. They are used by the giants of supplementary pension schemes to reduce the cost of health care by working on prevention. How much is for them to know how we are and the value of our cholesterol? Especially, if it is true that the Johnson and Johnson – been concerned by the cost of medical coverage for employees – offers $ 500 to its employees who share the company’s health curriculum. It adds 250 to those who agree to undergo regular colonoscopy as.

THE DATABASES OF HEALTH
Whenever we do tests, we are hospitalized or we donate blood, we leave behind a small gold mine of information that the stakes of privacy, unfortunately, defe nd only in fits and starts.

The America say – where 50% of medical information is online and their sale, McKinsey estimates will be worth $ 10 billion in 2020 – has very strict rules: this data can be sold legally by those who guards them (not the patients) only if “cleaned” 18 well-defined parameters such as address, name, age, sex. And they do already in many, twelve states have placed nearly two million medical records without a name (in theory) to insurance companies and the Department of Health brothers cashing something like 2 million euro in 2011. So did the British National Health Service which has a tariff ad hoc (8 thousand pounds for a package of a few thousand “file”, 140 pounds more for options such as age, sex and geolocation of each) for your records. And the Bupa – one of the biggest security reality of London – has already been set in line to detect block the service.

Too bad that the algorithms of Big Data hasten much faster wit h the rules on data protection personal. And as shown by a pair of recent research, a software just a little ‘sophisticated to be able to combine to different types of these legalissime identity cards medical sale a face and a specific person. “Needless illusions, those who give their health data to a structure to be seriously privacy,” says Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University. But stopping a runaway train is difficult: Washington has allocated 30 billion to computerize medical all memory of the country (which would save $ 450 billion a year on health care costs, says McKinsey). And in front of figures of this kind also the sacred right to privacy falters.

FACE ITALIAN
And Italy? Delays computer of Italy, in this case a virtue. It gave time to the guarantor to try to lock down meshed – where possible – the secrets of the patients. Insurance, experts and employers, to say, they can not access our Electronic Health Record, the identikit of the personal data kept by the health service in the heart of computer. A card can save your life in case of emergency and available only from doctors and hospitals explicitly indicated by the patient.

Even here, however, the risk of loopholes in the system are high. A few years ago the police have dismantled a network of 1,500 physicians who had gathered in the cooperative sold to pharmaceutical companies for about € 2 million data of 1.5 million people. Where there are no bad guys, it affects the genetic approximation flag. The Authority of Antonello Soro had to intervene because the software of the Health Record in Friuli, one of the most advanced experiments in the country, put at the disposal of all physicians in the region (and not only to the care provider) data of all patients. The guarantor has blocked also published on the websites of 26 municipalities of data on citizens for which you provided for the mandatory medical treatment, where they were placed next to the name and surname as well as assessments “person with suicidal tendencies.” The Puglia region took 45 thousand euro fine for having published on the corporate website of sensitive information 5 thousand disabled people who had benefited from subsidies for the purchase of computers. Initiative that has fed on the black market of medical records a small fortune. In the viewfinder is over as well a private Roman after providing free services as part of a campaign to prevent the mandatory then turn without applying for consent to pharmaceutical companies. Business is business. Although the best one he did the daughter of a doctor Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Florida, which has sold three x-rays for $ 45,000. But it was a rare piece: it was chest films of Marilyn Monroe.
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