Are there any diseases or disorders that are racially specific?
Isn’t sickle-cell anemia a race-linked disease?
I believe Tay Sachs is something that only affects Jews of Eastern European origin.
Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency occurs mainly among Africans and people from the Mediterranean region.
I think those two previously mentioned diseases are predominant in a particular group of people, though I don’t think you can call them “specific” to a particular race. I’d be inclined to think there are no human diseases that are “specific” to a race, because race is an artificial construct with undefinable (at least biologically) parameters.
I would add malaria to the list of diseases. Those people who have one Sickle Cell gene that do not show symptoms are more resistant to malaria then people without the gene. IIRC there is some minor benefit to Tay-Sachs but I cant remember what it is.
Most diseases go hand in hand with social class / status. Poor people are more likeyly to have chlorea and other diseases caused by unsanitary conditions. People who have enough food / good sanitation then begin to have problems like heart attacks, cancer, obesity etc. Access to medical care makes a big differernce in the fatality of these diseases.
Melanoma (skin cancer) is very rare among blacks, and much more common among caucasians. Blacks are not completely immune to it though.
Kuru - the laughing sickness, was once pretty much confined to a group of natives, in, I think, South America. It was a neurological disorder which affected the brains of the victims, causing them to sporadically laugh, gradually develop jerky motions of their limbs, which they started loosing control of, and their mental facilities. Eventually, it led to death.
The disease was confined to a small group which had practiced cannibalism in the not all that distant past. It often affected women and old men or children. The disease is only caught by eating brain tissue of an affected person and since warriors tended to consume the hearts and other choice parts of a capture, the women, children and old men ate the brains and lessor parts.
It was estimated that the small group of local tribes had been eating people for a long, long time for a disease to have developed specifically transmitted in such a way. I don’t recall if cooking the brains killed the disease or not.
Currently, Kuru is assumed to be extinct. The last known record of it, IIRC, was in the early 1970s.
This really hasn’t been said but touched upon. Sickle Cell Anemia appears to predominately affect African-Americans.
I seem to recall that hemophilia hasn’t been found in any group other than whites.
Just to add to the bit on Kuru: The tribe was the Fore located in Papau New Guinea. The man who studied this disease, Clayton Gajdusek, won the Nobel in 1976. It is believed that Kuru is passed on by prions, the same little buggers that are believed to be responsible for the transmission of Mad Cow Disease.
Anyway, to return to the OP, as others have mentioned there are diseases that tend to be more prevalent in certain ethnic groups but I think Sigene said it best. Many propensities towards diseases are genetic in origin but the idea of “race” isn’t. That’s really a cultural construct.
White men can’t jump.
I was just looking up information on prostate cancer the other day and was surprised to learn this disease hits black men something like 50% more than white men, though we do make that up in the skin cancer department
Short answer: No. Humans of all races can interbreed with one another, and therefore the genes for any disease may be passed on to any human. Eventually they’ll all intermingle. Diseases that are non-heritable (most cancers) are catchable by everyone, as well.
That said, there are obviously racial differences in genetic distribution and susceptibility. Everything mentioned above is pretty much correct, though I had thought Tay-Sachs tended to strike certain populations of Jews in the Middle East more than in Eastern Europe.
Sickle cell anemia strikes many, many more blacks because of the protective properties it has in Africa, where malaria is present.
Cystic fibrosis is about ten times more prevalent among Caucasians than any other races.
I’m pretty sure, though, that hemophilia has been found in more than one different race. I may be wrong, though.
LL
Kaposi’s sarcoma used to be found only among elderly Jewish men. They began studying AIDS when it started appearing in young gay men in San Francisco.
Boy, you’d think a guy calling himself “Doc” would have known the answer to this question.
CF has the same relationship to typhoid fever as sickle cell anemia has to malaria. See this page for details:
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/07.09/CysticFibrosisG.html
Like Alphagene said, its caused by prions,species specific little buggers that are not destroyed by cooking.Because the prions involved in mad cow disease have jumped to humans, there is a call to eliminate waste cattle parts in their feed.
This is interesting, because as far as I know, this is the only non genetic disease that has been limited to such a small number of people.
How about the disease Michael Jackson had? I believe it involved a development of light blotches on his skin. That was why he went to a dermatologist to get it all lightened.
And how about freckles. Do asian people have freckles? I do assume we define races by their appearance so any diseases that are specific to skin might be called race specific.
Micahel Jackson’s problem is called (I think) vitiglia. It’s a loss of skin pigmentation in an area, but it’s not race-specific. In fact, I’ve personally known a couple of white people afflicted with it.
And, yes, people of East Asian ancestry can have freckles. It doesn’t look the way freckles on a green-eye, red-hair 7-year old girl might look, but in the sense of darker spots in the complexion, they definitely class as freckles.