The birth of Britain’s first baby screened to ensure that it was free of the breast cancer gene carried by a parent was hailed yesterday as an important advance in the fight against genetic disease.

Specialists at University College Hospital spoke of their “absolute delight” after revealing that the girl and her mother were in good health. Paul Serhal, medical director of the Assisted Conception Unit at the hospital, told The Times: “The parents are absolutely elated. The baby is perfectly normal and the mother is happy. We are very proud.”

He added: “This little girl will not face the spectre of developing this genetic form of breast cancer or ovarian cancer in her adult life. The parents will have been spared the risk of inflicting this disease on their daughter. The lasting legacy is the eradication of the transmission of this form of cancer that has blighted these families for generations.”

However, to benefit from the technique, families must first know they have the defective gene, and up to 50 per cent of carriers have no family history to suggest that they are at risk.

A pilot programme at University College London is now seeking to investigate how screening for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes might be extended to a very wide population, including people with no family history of the disease. The study is offering testing to both women and men from the Ashkenazi Jewish community in London, regardless of whether cancer runs in their families.

Ashkenazi Jews have been chosen because this ethnic group has a particularly high risk of inheriting mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, the two most commonly involved in breast cancer. Women with a defective BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene are up to seven times more likely to develop breast cancer than those without the mutations.

Screening embryos for BRCA genes to ensure babies without breast cancer is the subject of much greater controversy. The technique, known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), has already been used to free babies of inherited disorders such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease. But breast cancer is different because it does not inevitably affect a child from birth and may or may not develop later in life. There is also a chance that it can be cured, if caught early enough.

Permission to carry out PGD for breast cancer had to be obtained from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority by the London clinic that performed the procedure.

In June, the mother, then 27, told how she decided to undergo the screening process after seeing all her husband’s female relatives suffer the disease. The woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said at the time: “We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down.”

The authority, which licenses IVF clinics and embryo research, gave approval after a public consultation.

Doctors at the private clinic at University College Hospital conducted tests on 11 embryos by removing just one cell from each when they were three days old. Six embryos were found to carry the defective BRCA1 gene. Two embryos that were free of the gene were implanted, resulting in a single pregnancy.

Sarah Cant, policy manager at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said that the decision was a “complex and very personal” issue. “Women with a family history of breast cancer tell us that what might be right for one person may not be right for another,” she said. “It’s important for anyone affected to have appropriate information and support so they can make the right choice for them.”

Government and opposition sour- ces doubted whether the new advance would imply funding problems for the NHS and said that it could eventually save money.

Faulty genes are responsible for between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the 44,000 cases of breast cancer that occur in Britain each year. By conducting a community-wide screening programme, scientists now hope to ascertain the exact benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. It will assess whether wider screening detects more people at risk from these defective genes, as well as the broader social consequences of such a programme.

Although population-level testing has the potential to help more people to identify health risks and change their lifestyles to lower them, it has also raised concerns about its psychological risks, particularly in people with little family experience of cancer.

Some experts are worried about the impact of a positive test, which may leave people scared, depressed or feeling guilty about the possibility that they could have passed the mutations to their children. Another risk is that a negative result might falsely reassure people, when it does not actually mean that they will never develop cancer.

Although the NHS already offers testing of BRCA genes, this is available only to women with relatives who have had cancer because of the mutation.

As many people who carry these faulty genes do not have a family history of the disease, many miss out on an early warning that can help them to take steps to reduce their risk. Some women opt for a preventive mastectomy, and others have more regular mammogram scans.

Many women who discover that they carry a BRCA gene will want to investigate screening embryos to avoid passing it on to their children. At present embryo screening costs between £2,000 and £3,000, on top of a similiar sum to cover IVF treatment. It is ocassionally available on the NHS but trusts set their own policies, often case by case.

Ian Jacobs, who is leading the project, said: “This is a model for the way we could approach population genetic testing on a larger scale.”

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