In recent years, the US Federal Government initiative on Precision Medicine requires key challenges for the development in biomedical research and healthcare to be addressed. This initiative has been extended to the rest of the world, adopting diversity of approaches according to the context of each country, region and respective health system. Among the challenges, it is essential to establish strong ethical pillars where privacy and trust must be foundational features of this approach to medicine, while allowing the continuity of the patient’s engagement (as the main actor of this initiative). In this sense, biomedical informatics is a field of science that can and should provide methods and tools to meet these challenges effectively.

Man has always been engaged in activities aimed at controlling and fighting threats against life and health. At earlier times magic and religion had important roles to play in explaining disease, death and misfortune as well as in generating strategies of combat against such dangers. Today, disease, death and misfortune have become secularised, individualised and privatised. Disease is no longer perceived as a shared common destiny, but as an individual experience.

Food labels and genetic tests are more similar than they appear. Attitudes of public health experts and policy makers are very different, however. Can we justify this? First, the analogies. 1. They are indications about health risk. Food labels provide consumers with information about the nutritional qualities of food; the newest kind of food label even try to convey information about the “health risk” associated with a specific type food, for instance, food high in salt or sugar content.