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Johns Hopkins is alerting more than 10,000 of its hospital patients that they may have been victims of identity theft. An investigation suggests a former employee who worked in patient registration may have been linked to a scheme to create fake drivers' licenses in Virginia, according to this letter from Baltimore-based Hopkins to the Maryland attorney general's office. Most of the patients are at very low risk, the letter says - they're included because the former employee accessed their records in the course of her work. But a few dozen have already been identified as likely victims, and a few hundred who have Virginia mailing addresses and whose records were accessed by the former employee may also be at risk. Hopkins is offering those patients credit monitoring, fraud resolution and identity-theft reimbursement for certain expenses.

Eight years ago, a woman we'll call Sarah discovered that she was not biologically related to the father she had known all her life. Sarah, her mother revealed, was "donor-conceived." Her parents, after trying without success for a pregnancy of their own in the late 1970s, turned to a fertility center, where Sarah's mother was artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor. At the time sperm banks did not offer detailed donor profiles. Upon discovering the truth, Sarah was told what her parents had been told about her biological father: He was a medical student, possibly of Scandinavian ancestry. Sarah, who describes her family as "loving and stable," was shocked. Today she is also sick. A year before finding out about her conception, she began to experience severe, unexplained bladder problems. She has been seeing doctors at Johns Hopkins; so far they haven't figured out the cause. Recently married, Sarah worries that she may pass the illness on to future children. The medical history of her biological father could provide a crucial piece of the diagnostic puzzle. But in the early days of artificial insemination, clinics often shredded or burned files to ensure donor anonymity and client privacy. Sarah's father's identity may be locked away in storage somewhere, or it may have been destroyed. Although aware of the likely futility of her search, Sarah still continues-writing the clinic, nurses, her doctor-in the hope that someone can help. Faced with stories like this, the fertility industry and a few state governments are trying to come up with a way to ensure that future donor-conceived children will have access to their fathers' medical files. A national registry, for example, could allow banks to monitor how many times a man donates semen and how many children are born from his seed, to share updates about medical issues and to facilitate long-term research on health outcomes. But any such registry poses a threat to the p

"The school's policy seems to violate the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), says Susannah Baruch of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. "Most generally," she says, "GINA prohibits health insurers and employers from using your genetic information against you." The law went fully into effect Nov. 21, and it prevents health insurers from collecting genetic information to make decisions about the insurance people get or how much it costs. The law also says an employer can't use it to make decisions about hiring, firing or job promotions. There are a few exceptions. The law doesn't apply to employers with fewer than 15 workers. And while it covers health insurance, it doesn't apply to life or long-term care insurance."