Ethical, legal and health economic aspects of neonatal screening

The spectrum of the title of this work is wide, but necessarily so, because of the increasing interaction of the three key components-ethics, law and health economy-in all parts of health systems. Although by nature the key c omponents are different, they are still interdependent. Ethics, as the over all term for values, norms and attitudes of democratic societies, is the ba sic reference for our controlling of our personal lives, our lives with eac h other, and our lives with society institutions in the broadest sense. Eth ics is the cambrium for control with our general behaviour, but is at the s ame time the cambrium fur the control mechanisms of societies, as expressed in national laws. Health economics is often considered a necessary but val ue-foe part of the spectrum, in accordance with money's very material natur e. And yet economics and other resource elements (as organs for transplanta tion or numbers of special experts) have a strong link to ethics via so-cal led distributional ethics ("we are able to do more than we can afford"). Th e main theme for this introduction is ethics. In neonatal screening it rela tes to two different aspects: one linked to the neonate as an individual wh o can benefit from early diagnosis of treatable diseases, the other to the neonate as a member of a family line, enabling geneticists later to use the results for genetic mapping of a whole family or of large societal groups.