(no subject)

[andrewducker]

I keep reading that "races" don't actually have any scientific basis. And then I read something like this which says that Blacks and Asians are much more likely to be affected by the new AIDs vaccine.

Anyone care to explain?

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Minor traits like blood type and other genetic features can have significant affects on how someone reacts to some medications. Often such traits can be associated with ancestry. However, one might have traits typically associated with Asian and Native American people simply by virtue of having a couple of fairly distant Native American ancestors or none of these, even if one has a mostly Asian ancestry. Lactose intolerance is a fairly obvious example of this. Plenty of black and white people have it, but most don't and most Asian people do.

However, we are talking about statistical predictions and given the fact that very few people do not have at least some ethnic mixing in their ancestry detailed predictions are impossible and what someone looks like is not a terribly good indication of which sets of these medical reactions someone might have. Also, data on how many of these reactions are caused by differing diets or levels of exposure to various environmental factors (childhood asthma is soaring in the US, and the reason seems to be because parents are severely limiting their children's access to dirt and dust, which contain chemicals and bacteria that help regulate the immune system - similar long-term, lethal peanut allergies are increasing because children are being fed products containing peanuts at too young an age).

The ideal situation would be to tailor medicine to each and every individual's physiology (which is clearly a mixture of both genetics and history [including diet, level of activity, exposure to various environmental factors...])

[andrewducker]

The ideal situation would be to tailor medicine to each and every individual's physiology

Well, obviously, yes.

This, to me, doesn't make the concept of 'race' any less interesting in a statistical way. Individuals, after all, will always be unique, but that doesn't mean that you can't find patterns on a larger scale.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

True, but for meaningful data we often need to look beyond visible markers like race, since they are both useless for any cross cultural studies (since what race someone is categorized as is highly variable from one culture to the next) and because having a few ancestors of a different ethnicity may not be at all visible and can totally change results. For example, imester is 5/8s Native American (from various tribes from the american south). In fact, both sides of her family are. However, she also has blue eyes, pale skin, and brown hair and no one in her family would ever be taken for being Native American (they all have pale skin and IIRC blue or green eyes). Anyone who sees her is going to mark race as "white", and she does on forms. However, her whole family have a set of reactions to sugar that IIRC are typical of NA populations of that area (hyperinsulinism) as well as a number of other odd medical reactions that are more common among Asians and Native Americans.

[andrewducker]

Agreed - we definitely need to look beyond what's visible.

I'm reminded of the changes that happened in biology when they moved from classification based on looks to classification based on genetics and several species got moved from one area to another.