In article <a07b18e4.0311131642.1a9b9ff7@posting.google.com>, geminii2 wrote: Kelly (must you top post?) It is unfortunate that you are so quick to ridicule a persons presentation of facts simply because you find the truth to be "unbelievable". Grow up. As Ralph pointed out, the data and cold hard evidence is everywhere to be found...but you have to be willing to actually pull off the blinders and SEE the proof. As a way of showing you how widespread and worldwide the issue of false paternity is, I will start with an example of how a child might unwittingly discover the truth... A schoolteacher in southern England during the 1970's assigned a class science project in which his students were to determine the blood types of their parents. The students were then told to use this data to predict their own blood type (in most instances only a limited number of combinations is possible because a gene from each parent determines the offspring's blood type). One can imagine the confusion and misery that ensued when 30% of the students discovered that it was impossible for their dads to be their biological fathers. And don't forget, since some parental combinations would allow for the possibility of multiple blood types then the actual percent of mistaken paternities would probably be higher. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995 entitled "Blood Grouping Tests in Undisputed Paternity Proceedings" using the A-B-O blood typing system, it was found that 18% of men who *voluntarily* admitted paternity were not the actual fathers of the children. True ethical dilemnas have arisen for physicians who deal in the treatment of heredity diseases and genetic counseling since the onset of DNA testing. The Lancet published an article, "Non-paternity rate and screening in genetic disease analysis" in 1993. "Geneticists have stumbled upon this phenomenon in the course of conducting large population studies and hunting for the genes that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis. They find full-siblings to be half siblings, fathers who are genetic strangers to more than one of their children and uncles who are closer to nieces and nephews than anyone might guess. Lumped under the heading of 'pedigree errors', these so-called mis-paternities, false paternities and non-paternities are all science jargon for the unwitting number of us who are chips off someone else's block". A research paper "Parental paternity testing with deoxyribonucleic acid techniques" published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 1996 found that in postnatal testing 37% of alleged fathers were excluded from being the father of that child. Prenatal testing excluded about 53% of alleged fathers. Believe what you want. Do you KNOW who YOUR father is?

Can you post some web references? Maybe something that I can read on
medline? The numbers that you cite are, frankly, unbelievable and I
want to be assured that they come from actual studies and not reposts
of reposts of reposted emails etc.

i