Saini 11 and afterword
you can see the engraving she references in the first sentence here
African-Americans are more likely to have high blood pressure
but they are also more likely to die of many other diseases
and people living in Africa have very low hypertension rates
Sickle Cell Anemia is thought to be a genetic disease of black
people--if you have one copy of the gene you are more resistant to
malaria, two and you have red blood cells so malformed that it is
very painful disease. But even this is less clear--almost the
same disease found in people of Mediterranean background is
called Thalassemia. Doctors chose to name as separate diseases
very similar genetic diseases in black and white people. Even the
Sickle Cell gene, while much less common in white people, is found
in as many white babies as black (because whites are a larger
percentage of the population)
attempts to find a genetic basis of higher hypertension rates
failed
Turns out level of education predicts rates better than percentage
of African ancestry
The salt issue is tricky because only some people benefit from low
salt, but stress is key
Black Americans are more affected and more severely affect by
asthma, why?
- they are more likely to live in polluted
cities
- in less healthy housing
- get worse medical care (see article linked to
infographic)
Social categories get used as if they were
genetic categories, which makes no medical sense
there may be difference of medical significance
between ethnic groups (even if those are due to differences in
rates of smoking and meat eating. But that doesn't mean that
deciding by ethnic category which medication to give is good
practice--it is a poor marker for figuring out what works best
for different people
Saini argues that the problem fundamentally is
that the use of race as a scientific category at all makes room
for all kinds of political baggage.
why are African Americans harder hit by COVID-19 in
at least some
cities?
- less likely to be in jobs that allow working
from home
- less likely to be able to afford to not work
- more live in crowded, unhealthy conditions
the government is hiding information to
manipulate the behavior of the public
going forward think about what information the public gets and
how we deal with complexity (eg. global warming)
Afterword:
"'I have a lot of relatives who survived the Holocaust,' the
historian said. 'They are prepared for things to cease to be
normal very quickly because that was their experience.'"
Saini feels that things are ceasing to be normal even before the
epidemic.
If we know that science can fairly easily be
distorted by politics and by personal preconceptions but will
eventually self-correct, what should we do differently?
Questions for discussion
relationship between science and politics
- what is the problem with race as a scientific
or medical category
- how are we seeing today some of the same
problems of science getting distorted by politics