International Neonatal Screening Day

EventsNews

On June 28, we are celebrating the International Neonatal Screening Day (INSD), a unique opportunity to raise awareness throughout the world about the importance of neonatal screening to speed-up diagnosis and treatment.

Currently available scientific evidence clearly demonstrates that the early asymptomatic detection enabled by neonatal screening, when linked to appropriate treatment, can be life changing and even lifesaving. While screening for some conditions, such as phenylketonuria (PKU) or congenital hypothyroidism (CH) is in place in most national programmes, the implementation of other conditions, such as severe combined immunodeficiencies (SCID) or spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), is more limited, despite growing attention over the past decade.
Thus, the INSD is expected to be a real stimulus to raise awareness about the value of neonatal screening, as well as encourage collaboration and the sharing of best practices to continually improve routine screening and ensure the newest scientific evidence is incorporated.

Over the recent years, MetabERN has raised awareness about the importance of newborn screening in meetings such as the “Achieving Equity and Innovation in Newborn Screening” – an accompanying event of the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU and the “Moving towards NBS as a system: Setting out the roadmap”, leading to the comment paper “Newborn screening as a fully integrated system to stimulate equity in neonatal screening in Europe” and supported the Call To Action – Newborn Screening for Rare Diseases launched by the multi-stakeholder initiative, Screen4Rare.

The INSD is an initiative led by the International Society for Neonatal Screening (ISNS), the International Patient Organisation for Primary Immunodeficiencies (IPOPI) and the European Society for Immunodeficiencies (ESID), which have been working in partnership under the multi-stakeholder Screen4Rare initiative.
For further information, please visit the INSD website and read the ISDN leaflet.