[reaperman]

False positive rates are a concern for any widespread medical testing. If you test everyone in the USA for a rare disorder, a super great test might have a 1% false positive rate and 1% false negative rate. It's good that you catch 99% of people with the disorder, but that might only be 10,000 people. At the same time, you'll get 3.3 million false positives which will absolutely swamp the medical systems for follow-up tests, some of which will also have false positives. This costs a ton of money at the very least for unnecessary follow-up testing, and realistically would overwhelm the medical systems designed for just those 10,000 people. It also causes a great amount of undue stress and financial burden on the 3.3 million affected families.

Some people will also be unlucky enough to get false positives on the follow-up test, and eventually you may end up performing unnecessary invasive interventions on 30,000 people who don't have the underlying condition.

It's not to say that:

> the earlier you detect it, the better.

Is wrong, per se. But we'll need to narrow down the criteria for who should be recommended to get these tests in order to minimize harms from false-positives. So you'd want to identify risk factors and have a way to check if someone has those risk factors before testing them.