There are minimum requirements when it comes to paternity testing and these requirements are set by the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB). There are two committees that set these requirements and the people who sit on these committees are volunteers who work in private paternity testing labs across the nation.
So with these minimum requirements, how can DNA paternity testing go wrong? When matching up the DNA, certain short sequences of DNA that have been obtained from the child. If one of these sequences match a sequence from the putative father, then he might indeed be the biological father. However, that one sequence is not unique to that man. There are other men out there who carry it as well. This means that other genetic markers must be correlated and the more that are matched up, the higher the likelihood the man is the father.
Then question that arises from this, then, is how far do labs take the testing? There are some labs that do only the minimum required level of testing, which means that if they do hundreds or thousands of tests in a year, they are bound to give out a few inaccurate test results, most of which the recipients of the results will never be aware. There are also labs that will test beyond the minimum required levels, analyzing the DNA until they find a matching pattern (or not). These tests will be more accurate by far in determining paternity.
What is the minimum required level? It is 99%, which means that one in every hundred tests will be inaccurate. The labs that go the extra mile get a 99.9% accuracy (one in a thousand is inaccurate) or a 99.99% accuracy (one in ten thousand is inaccurate) give far better odds. Without highly accurate testing, the results could falsely label a man as the father of a child.
Men can also be falsely excluded as the father of a child for a number of reasons. Human error is often a reason, with the samples being placed in the wrong envelopes. Sometimes the man will try to trick the test by sending in a friend's DNA rather than his own. False exclusions can also happen if the lab does not do a thorough enough analysis of the DNA. For instance, they are only required to ensure that two DNA locations match for paternity to be established, but labs will sometimes give up if they find two that don't match. While this is rare, the child's DNA can mutate so that there are non-matching points, which makes identifying a third point necessary.
With something as delicate as the paternity of a child in the balance, it is best to stick with labs that produce highly accurate results, even if you have to pay more for the DNA paternity testing. Labs that give 99.9% or 99.99% and those that exceed minimum testing levels in all areas of testing are the best. After all, no one wants to go through life not knowing the truth about who is their father or who is their child. Choosing the right lab will ensure that is the case.
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