Paul, did you read my post? Tay-Sachs is as common amongst certain French Canadians and Cajuns as Ashkenazi Jews. The sickle cell anemia - black skin link is true for America, but not other places. Witness relatively high rates in Saudi Arabia and Greece.
It’s a subtle but important distinction:
Sickle-cell anemia is prevalent amongst blacks: false.
Sickle-cell anemia is prevalent in Americans of African heritage: true.
It’s not about PC, it’s about being accurate and dispelling race myths.
Sorry to spoil your spoiler, but that disease is being seen far more frequently outside its original northern European ethnic group.
One study included 283 unrelated carriers, with the following ethnic composition: 78% non-Ashkenazi Caucasians, 5% Ashkenazi, 9% African-American, 3% Mexican, 0.3% Native American, and 5% mixed ancestry.
So we see over 10% of carriers are non-white in this example.
This is just anecdotal evidence gleaned from an article I read somewhere:
Apparently the ability for Europeans to better handle alcohol stems from the fact that mildly alcoholic beverages (called ‘small beer’ I believe) were drank instead of water as it was deemed safer and obviously no-one realised the health implications. Asians on the other hand drank plain old water and as a result don’t have centuries of tolerance to alcohol built up inside them. The article in question was a lot more detailed and seemed very plausible but maybe someone else can shed light on the likelihood of this phenomenon.
It’s more along the lines of: In many areas, water was undrinkable in its original state. European activities used fermentation to create a non-dangerous drink, while Asians opted for brewing (tea, etc). Beer wasn’t “Deemed Safer” - it simply was safer. And most people died far earlier than the onset of typical alcohol-related illnesses.
Incidentally, ‘small beer’ was the weaker version of standard beer, specifically made for children to drink :eek:
In a study done more than ten years ago, doctors at the University of Alberta in Edmonton found that aboriginal people metabolized alcohol slower than people of European descent. In simple terms - they stayed drunk longer. Their theory was Europeans’ long history of digesting carbohydrates from grains and starches versus the aboriginals’ traditional diet of primarily meat had an evolutionary effect with regards to metabolizing alcohol. The story of this study was published in the right wing Alberta Report magazine but no more was heard of it. Too much politics and political correctness, too many vested interests, involved in the issue.
One of the fundamental disputes with regards to substance abuse is the disagreement about the destructive or “evil” qualities of the abused substance versus the destructive or “evil” qualities of the “underlying social problems” and, with so many influential people and so much money involved in addressing the social issues, any studies focused on the physical properties of the substance in question can be perceived as simplistic, a digression, even a threat to conventional thinking. Perhaps this is why shrieks of “racism” will still be heard if anyone makes a general statement that aboriginals, as a race, have problems with alcohol.
I work with American Indians, and I’ll not argue with the assertions that alcohol abuse is an enormous problem among many Indian communities. But I regularly see something which doesn’t jive at all with the theory that Indians lack the ability to process alcohol. Rather, I think it is the opposite.
It’s not unkown for some of our guests here in Washington, DC to go “off the reservation.” (I apologize if anyone finds this phrase pejorative–it is, however, very literal and very real.) They come into town, start boozing it up from the moment they get there and don’t really stop, and three or four days later they aren’t interested in working anymore.
Some of these guys (and occasionally, gals) can consume massive quantities of alcohol. Like I said, it takes two or three days of hard drinking for some of these folks to really get soused enough to just decide to quit working and have a good time, and that good time generally continues throughout the week. There appears to be a culture of limited acceptance of this practice, too, because the same folks keep coming back and doing the same thing, and like I said, it’s not just a few individuals.
I know other American Indians who don’t bother drinking because they say it’s too expensive–they say they just can’t drink enough to get any of the percieved benefits out of it. It seems illogical to me that these folks have developed a massive tolerance to alcohol from occasional and irregular use–and abuse.
And here’s another really strange thing, which is unfortunately anecdotal. I know of a surprisingly large number of American Indians who quit drinking entirely at about the age of 35-45. That also coincides with the age in which these folks usually begin to take on larger tribal responsibilities such as tribal leadership or higher management positions within tribally-owned businesses. Admittedly, this perspective is probably tightly filtered by the professional evrironment in which I worked for so long, but I still sense a disconnect in the idea that some of these people who are supposedly predisposed to alcohol addiction can apparently so easily drop the habit after half a lifetime of serious abuse.
Unfortunately, I’m not very good at parsing health statistics or reading medical studies, which is why you won’t find any citations in this post. I’m just asking the professionals out there, have these issues ever been studied, and have my personal observations ever been confirmed?
Was that population from the United States?
See, the US is not a particularly good place for this sort of study because so many folks are “mutts”. A very high percentage of “African Americans” have ancestors from continents other than Africa, hence their incidence of a “white disease” will be higher than populations who are actually in Africa and don’t have ancestory from other continents. “Mexicans” is another grab-bag, as “Mexicans” are just as intermixed, if not more so, than their nieghbor to the north. “Native Americans” range from groups who insist on wholly “native” lineage for membership to those that are so intermixed with other groups that an entire tribe might now resemble the surronding society more than they resemble their ancestors 5 generations back.
So… I would expect non-Caucasians in the US/North America to have higher incidence of cystic fibrosis than anywhere else in the world.
Your assumption seems correct. At least, if you’re to believe this site:
It appears that overall, CS is more prevalent in populations of northern European origin. Again, I think this goes to show how ultimately useless the concept of “race” really is. To give an example: if this site is correct, the incidence of CF in Denmark is 1 per 4,700 births. In Finland, however, there are only 1 or 2 new cases a year for 60,000 births. There are only 48 Fins who have CF. Both Danes and Fins, however, would fall squarely in the caucasian race.
Don’t the Fins have some ancestry from central Asia, contrarily to the Danes (they’re speaking a “Finno-Ungaric??” language…sorry for the spelling, I don’t know how to write this in english) which could possibly explain the difference?
From what I understand, not much is known for sure about where Fins came from. People have been living in Finland for probably as long as 100,000 years, but Finno-Ugrian cultures occupied a very large territory extending to the Ural. For sure, Fins are unique in a few ways, including their language and the virtual absence of CF. My point is that when talking about genetics, it’s a lot more meaningful to talk about Danes and Fins as being two different population groups than belonging to the same “caucasian race”.