Dr. Jane Tiller

Those 202 brings it to about 2%, one in 50 people who had this really high risk of disease.

So that's a two-pronged question and I'm going to deal with both of those parts.

The first is about people who maybe don't want to know and that's a really important

question when you look at things like genetic testing and any public health screening program, we never coerce people to participate and we would never mandate people to be part of a population screening program for genomics.

We know that there is a huge amount of public interest.

I mean, we filled out 10,000 spots

with registrations in the first day of advertising.

We have now tens of thousands of people sitting on a waiting list who are hoping that we'll get funding to expand this testing.

We know that there is a huge amount of interest in this type of testing and that Australians want this kind of testing.

Not everybody does.

And so absolutely people who decide that they would rather not know, that's a choice that we would respect.

But the second part of your question is around the people that do want to know and what are the public health care models of care that really cater for that and are they sufficient?

And the answer is that we really do need to do some scaffolding at infrastructure and model of care work to get the Australian system ready for population screening at scale.

Our DNA screen study demonstrated that it's feasible to do this, but we do need to develop some new models of care that move genetic testing out of the diagnostic context and into a preventive primary care context where it's not done at the moment.

And that's what our proposal to the government has been, which is to scale up this testing to 100,000 people

and to develop and test some of those models of care to generate that evidence and get our health system ready for down the track, putting in place a whole of population screening program.

Absolutely.

And there are a few elements to that, especially when you compare with some international studies that have looked at things like this.

Part of it is that we made sure that every person, when they were high risk, received genetic counselling immediately.

So we had short-term genetic counselling support for everybody.