Health maintenance and treatment are only one aspect of general medical care. Keep Illinois Health Care also includes programs to help police locate missing children in their families. The Manteno Police, assisted by members of the Manteno Parent Teachers Association, recently began a campaign to help locate the missing children. According to the Illinois State Police, more than 2,000 children were reported missing last year. Across the country there were nearly 800,000 children reported missing last year. Of this number, about 25% were kidnapped by someone from their own family; and about 8% were kidnapped by someone outside the family. The Manteno Police Department became the first law enforcement agency in the area to take children’s fingerprints as a means of identification. Following the 1983 kidnapping and murder of two ten-year-old boys in Bolingbrook and Naperville, Manteno police in April 1983 fingerprinted 240 Manteno children.
Last year all students in the Manteno School District were fingerprinted to establish children’s identity records. This year DNA samples were taken from all new elementary and preschool students in the Manteno School District as the first step in the missing children’s locator program. Manteno Police believe that DNA testing is the wave of the future because it provides the most reliable identification possible.
The DNA test is simply a matter of taking saliva samples from the child’s mouth; this makes painful blood sampling unnecessary. The parents of each child receive a sealed envelope from the Manteno health workers that contains the swab with their child’s DNA sample. Parents should store these swabs in a cool, dry, dark place. The director of security for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Nancy McBride, explained that DNA testing is considered the gold standard of tools available to identify missing children. She said it’s great that the Manteno Police Department is providing this service and giving the children’s parents the DNA samples for safekeeping. In this way, the privacy of children and families is maintained. DNA testing will become more and more common as it is such a useful and foolproof form of identification. For example, according to a health care spokesperson from South Chicago, Illinois, young men who are having babies with women they are not married to are advised to have DNA testing done before acknowledging paternity. children, because the Illinois Department of Public Aid will order men to pay child support, even if subsequent DNA tests show that the child is not theirs.