According to a survey of 26 sperm banks reported in the July 2010 edition of Fertility and Sterility, sperm banks vary considerably in their practices of genetic screening of donors.
Cystic fibrosis carrier screening, chromosome analyses, and hemoglobin evaluations are performed on the majority of sperm donor applicants. Tay-Sachs disease carrier screening is performed on most donors with Jewish heritage but there is significant variation in screening for other disorders .
Since the screening of sperm donors is not usually complete, we recommend that all of our patients do a fairly comprehensive screening of themselves or their partner (if they are using their partner's sperm) for recessive genetic diseases. We use Counsyl screening which screens over 100 recessive diseases using a saliva specimen. Of course there are still some genetic diseases not covered such as the ones that are dominant and others that are not in Counsyl's panel. One still needs to rely on family history and ethnicity to determine if any other testing is needed.
We are fortunate that technology exists to determine if anyone is a carrier of an abnormal gene since we can now employ preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for single gene defects to detect whether an embryo is affected before transfer, thus reducing the chance of a child with the genetic disease without needing to consider termination of a pregnancy.