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4 hours ago
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A leading geneticist has called for the profits from windfarms to be used for the mass screening of Scottish islanders at risk of rare cancers and blood disorders.
Prof Jim Wilson, who leads a Viking DNA project that has discovered hotspots of rare disorders in Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles, said that money could prove vital in identifying people who need life-saving treatments.
“Genomic medicine is the future of medicine – but it requires funding,” Wilson said. “These windfarm funds are a perfect opportunity to make a difference to the health of the population today and that of future generations.”
New windfarms and other green energy projects across rural and island Scotland are expected to generate tens of millions of pounds in “community benefit funding”, where a portion of the profits are shared with local people.
Community benefit funds are usually spent on projects such as road upgrades, new village halls, communal gardens or youth employment schemes.
Wilson said using those funds for mass screening, targeted at illnesses that heavily affect island populations, would be far more socially useful and cost-effective. “This is much more important than a nice piece of road,” he said.
Such schemes are too expensive for the NHS and only one is publicly funded – the screening of the Jewish population in England for inherited breast and ovarian cancer through the J-BRCA testing programme.
The proposal has been flagged by Torcuil Crichton, the Labour MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (the Western Isles), after Wilson’s project found a “shockingly high” incidence of a rare blood disorder called haemochromatosis in the region.
Crichton has haemochromatosis, which involves the slow buildup of dangerous levels of iron in the blood, causing lethargy, weight loss and joint pain. If left untreated it can cause liver disease, diabetes, arthritis and heart failure.
After years with joint pain and fatigue, he found out he had the disorder after a relative with it urged him to get tested. “This would be revolutionary and it would save money for the NHS in the short term and the longterm,” he said.
“More importantly, it would save lives and put us two decades ahead of the rest of the country in preventive medicine, with the bill going to the community payback from windfarm developments.”
Wilson’s project, a collaboration with scientists at the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, has identified clusters of rare breast and ovarian cancers in Shetland and Orkney involving the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.
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That led to a pilot project to screen people on Westray with a Westray-born grandparent for BRCA1, funded by the island’s development trust.
The testing has also found that one in 40 Shetlanders carry the gene for Batten disease, a fatal disorder where babies experience neurodegeneration. That raises the risk that a local couple who are carriers could have a child fated to die from it.
Wilson said many disorders it had identified, including haemochromatosis, were linked to Scotland’s Celtic roots rather than Viking ancestry, and were also prevalent in Ireland.
If the funds were available, he said bespoke testing programmes would be set up in the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland to screen for community-specific diseases. That could allow carriers to seek treatment at a much earlier stage or to allow “informed reproductive choices”.
