Almost 200 Children Born From Donor Carrying Deadly Cancer Gene | Health – Time
Around 200 children across several European countries were conceived using sperm from a single donor who unknowingly carried a rare genetic mutation linked to aggressive, early-onset cancers. The impact has been heartbreaking. Some children have already died, while many families are now living with the fear that their child could develop cancer in infancy, childhood, or early adulthood.
Naturally, this case has raised troubling questions. How could one donor be used so widely? Why didn’t existing safety checks catch such a serious risk? And how did a system designed to help people build families allow something this devastating to happen?
How donor screening works — and where it falls short
Before donating sperm or eggs, donors are screened for certain inherited conditions. This usually involves medical tests and a detailed questionnaire about the donor’s own health and their family history. But this process has limits.
Much of the screening depends on what a donor knows about their relatives. Many people don’t have complete or accurate family health information. Some genetic conditions also don’t show symptoms until later in life, meaning a young donor can appear perfectly healthy.
Clinics tend to focus on more common, well-known conditions. Rare genetic mutations — especially newly identified ones — are often not included in standard screening.
Why advanced testing didn’t stop this case
In recent years, some fertility clinics have introduced expanded genetic screening, which checks hundreds of genes linked to serious childhood or early adult diseases. While this is a step forward, it’s not foolproof.
These tests still can’t detect every harmful mutation. Very rare variants may not be included in testing panels or may be difficult to identify with current technology. In this case, the donor had no family history of the condition and no symptoms himself. Even with broader testing, experts say the mutation may still have gone undetected.
How one donor fathered so many children
The donor supplied sperm to the European Sperm Bank in Denmark for about 17 years. His donations were used to conceive roughly 200 children in multiple countries — and the real number could be higher.
This happened because there is no global system limiting how many families can be created from one donor. Many countries do have national caps. The UK, for example, allows a donor to be used for no more than ten families.
The problem is that these limits stop at national borders. A donor can be used in multiple countries, with no international tracking to flag when overall numbers become dangerously high.
In a separate case, another donor was later found to have fathered around 1,000 children worldwide. That case didn’t involve known health risks, but it exposed how easily donor use can spiral out of control.
The real cost for families
For affected families, the consequences are life-altering. Some are grieving the loss of a child. Others live with constant uncertainty, knowing their child faces a high risk of developing cancer before age 60 — often much earlier.
There has been little public discussion about the donor’s experience, but learning about the outcomes of his donations is likely emotionally devastating as well.
It’s important to understand that no screening system can guarantee zero risk. Every person carries some genetic variants that may never cause problems — or may only be discovered years later.
What makes this case so shocking isn’t just the mutation itself, but the sheer number of children affected. Earlier cases involving conditions like cystic fibrosis or fragile X syndrome usually involved far fewer families.
Why limits and tracking matter more than testing alone
Calling for “more testing” sounds like a simple solution, but it wouldn’t fully prevent cases like this. The bigger issue is the lack of international limits and monitoring.
In some countries, even existing national rules were exceeded. Belgium, for example, allows sperm from one donor to be used for only six families, yet reports suggest about 38 families were created using this donor.
What’s urgently needed is a coordinated system to track donor use across borders. Without it, national limits are easy to bypass. Setting global caps will be politically and legally challenging, but this case shows why the discussion can’t be delayed.
As commercial DNA testing becomes more common, large networks of donor-conceived siblings across different countries are increasingly being discovered. For families, the emotional, medical, and social implications are profound.
A coordinated international approach won’t eliminate all risk — but it could prevent another tragedy of this scale. Families deserve safeguards that match the reality of a global fertility industry, not systems that stop at the border.
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