Clinic that finds who's your dad a hit

REUTERS

NEW YORK: A mobile DNA testing facility that looks more like a motor home than a medical clinic is raising questions about the ramifications of quick and easy tests to determine paternity and other biological connections.

Once a time-consuming and complicated process, DNA testing has become so accessible that experts worry families and individuals may not be properly prepared for the results.

An 8.5-metre recreational vehicle cruising around New York City emblazoned with the question “Who’s Your Daddy?”, and offering on-the-spot DNA testing services starting at $299, has renewed those concerns.

The clinic, operated by a New York company called Health Street, started in 2010 but was revamped two months ago.

Passersby can hail the conspicuous brown and blue Winnebago to have DNA samples taken by a technician, packaged and sent to a laboratory in Ohio. Results are returned within three to five business days. Mandatory prescriptions for the tests from a customer’s physician can be faxed via the Internet to the RV.

While it is common for DNA testing distributors, companies who take the samples and send them to labs for analysis, to offer mobile collection services, Health Street appears to be the first to splash exactly what it does on the vehicle. “DNA TESTING” in bold red lettering is painted on the side.

Jared Rosenthal, who founded Health Street and drives the RV, recounts some of the people affected by his service: Two women who learned they were half-sisters, and a man whose suspicion that he might be the father of a friend’s daughter was confirmed.

Experts say there has been a steady increase in demand for such tests in the United States, reaching close to 500,000 a year, according to Michael Baird, director of DNA Diagnostics, a DNA testing laboratory, in part because the rate of births to unmarried women has also been increasing.

State child-support agencies make up the bulk of this demand, but experts said the number of people simply seeking answers, and the accompanying number of venues and ways to test for family relationships, have increased.

Typical customers at Health Street include men who are engaged and want to confirm offspring from a past relationship, returning soldiers seeking reassurance that they fathered newly-born children, and women inquiring about paternity on behalf of their children, Rosenthal said.

The door, however, is open to heartbreak, especially when men discover that somebody else fathered their children.