Talk:Race and health/Archive 1

This is an archive of past discussions about Race and health. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

What causes the lower life exptancy?

It should be possible to find out from official statistcs exactly which diseases or circumstances cause the lower life expectancy.Ultramarine 06:26, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Diabetes is HUGE for US blacks
"reduced mortality" may come from other factors that don't show up as a cause of death.
I don't know if all of these studies control for violent deaths. Some do, however.

futurebird 06:40, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Race and racism section

I think that much of this material should be in the Race or Racism articles. There could be a smally summary in thie article and a link to these main articles.Ultramarine 06:14, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, read it to rapidly, the articles are directly related to the subject.Ultramarine 17:31, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I trimmed it a bit, so I think that also helped. futurebird 17:35, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Do not merge with health disparities

This article should not be merged with health disparities. First off, these are two separate subjects, with health disparities being a subsubject of this article. This means there are large sections of this article which would not be appropriate in the health disparities article. I like how the article is now, with a section of this article being about health disparities with a link to the main health disparities article. Please note, though, that my comments have nothing to do with the larger issues raised on this article's talk page. Only about merging the two articles. Best, --Alabamaboy 23:25, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay. Fair enough. futurebird 15:51, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

European Americans at low risk for obesity

the US is 40% obese, the vast majority of the obese people are "european americans". this is not a "low" risk and doctors don't treat it that way. doctors they don't make any decisions or recommendations based on these low risks ("i see you're white, feel free to eat mcdonalds regularly....you're at a low risk for obesity"). this should be rephrased or removed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.112.7.212 (talk) 16:55, 10 March 2007 (UTC).

I support this change. This article contains a quite a few problems along these lines. Please feel free to help revise it. futurebird 18:02, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Problem with one section, Health disparities

The section on Health disparities does not work. The first paragraph mentions both health and health care. The second paragraph only adduces instances of differences in health. I think that if the section is going to mean anything it should report any correlations between health of the various [races] and the quality of health care being afforded to them. If lots of people in one group are dying because of melanoma, is that simply because that group is susceptible to that disease, or is it because there is no public health initiative to teach people to look for symptoms, because people's concerns are pooh-poohed when they seek care, because members of that group get poor care when they do present for treatment, etc. P0M 02:05, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

risk table

I think this table should be deleted because it is overly simplistic. there are no figures to back it up. Muntuwandi 04:30, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree. futurebird 15:25, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Why use unexplained acronyms?

What is SES supposed to mean? It is linked to an article but "socio-economic" only explains the "SE" part. Readers should not be forced to guess. P0M 02:20, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Agree. Let's remove them. futurebird 15:26, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Stuff to add

Posting some sources to add. futurebird 15:11, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

http://www.alternet.org/rights/64567/ The Health Risks of Racism By Molly M. Ginty, Women's eNews. Posted October 9, 2007.

Black women are twice as likely as white women to give birth prematurely and five times more likely to do so in Southern states such as Mississippi.
A black woman is 3.7 times more likely to die during pregnancy than a white woman and six times more likely to do so in some urban areas such as New York City.
The center's 19-member Courage to Love: Infant Mortality Commission -- funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and partnering with the UCLA School of Public Affairs and the University of Michigan's NIH Roadmap Disparities Center -- says the health problems of black women and black infants stem not just from inadequate medical care but from stress, racism, poverty and other social pressures.
Only 75 percent of African American women have prenatal care compared to 89 percent of white women.
Black women are more likely than their peers to have hypertension and diabetes, which can leave the fetus undernourished.

Image? =

Should we add this image? futurebird 17:30, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

aids and genetics

I take caution to saying that gene accelerates in africans. I know it prevents aids in whites but it seems to be no where else.YVNP (talk) 07:49, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !

In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :)

"parks" :
- ''[http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=11-13-07&storyID=28458 Minority Communities Need More Parks, Report Says]'' by Angela Rowen The Berkeley Daily Planet
- ''[http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=11-13-07&storyID=28458 Minority Communities Need More Parks, Report Says]'' by By Angela Rowen The Berkeley Daily Planet
"eight" :
- [http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_6370.shtml Study: Race, Location Affects Longevity]
- ..
"lavest" :
- [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1360970 Racial Segregation and Longevity among African Americans: An Individual-Level Analysis] Thomas A LaVeist
- ..

DumZiBoT (talk) 18:59, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to change article name

I propose that the name of this article be changed to "Race and health in the United States". Any comments? --Saul Greenberg (talk) 14:51, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

I see that this question was raised by the sock puppet of a banned user. But there is warrant for discussing changing the name of this article, but perhaps not along the lines suggested last year. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 23:24, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Source list for articles about genetics and human health

You may find it helpful while reading or editing articles to look at a bibliography of Human Biology Citations, posted for the use of all Wikipedians who have occasion to edit articles on human genetics and related issues. I happen to have circulating access to a huge academic research library system at a university with an active research program in these issues (and to other libraries in the same large metropolitan area) and have been researching these issues sporadically since 1989. You are welcome to use these citations for your own research. You can help other Wikipedians by suggesting new sources through comments on that page. It will be extremely helpful for articles on human genetics to edit them according to the Wikipedia standards for reliable sources for medicine-related articles, as it is important to get these issues as well verified as possible. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 23:26, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

"Your revert"

WeijiBaikeBianji, it seems that you want to discuss with me why you think the content that you’ve removed from this article misrepresents its source. You already explained this here [1] According to your comments there, the only part that misrepresents its source was the first sentence, which I chose to change in order to be more accurate. In my edit the first sentence said "New interest in human biological variation has resulted in a resurgence of the use of race in biomedicine." And what the source says is, "Far from waning in the age of molecular genetics, race has been resurgent in biomedical discourse, especially in relation to a torrent of new interest in human biological variation and its quantification."

Keep in mind that all of the sources cited here are online for free, so I can personally read them just as anyone else can. In addition to explaining why all of the content you’ve blanked in this paragraph misrepresented its sources, you also need to explain how the content you’re replacing it with is “neutral.” The content you’ve replaced it with says “this practice is criticized by epidemiologists who have carefully studied how little "race" serves as a predictor of disease.” Why do you use scare quotes around the word race, when none of the sources do this? And do you not see anything wrong with the neutrality of talking about epidemiologists “carefully studying how little it predicts disease”, emphasizing your view that it does not predict disease very much, and that people who believe otherwise haven’t studied this carefully? For me, this doesn’t seem very neutral.-SightWatcher (talk) 02:40, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

SightWatcher's conduct is a bit suspicious. Seems to support Ferahgo the Assassin too frequently for this support to be a coincidence. Wapondaponda (talk) 04:57, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. The block of text you put into article text refers to sickle-cell anemia as an example of the usefulness of "race" categorization in medicine, but that has to be a mistake, because the cited source I have most focused on in the edits specifically mentions that sickle-cell anemia screening in the United States is universal, without regard to race. I will add other sources to the article text that I have found since that paragraph was last edited. Then we will see what due weight should be given to varying points of view on the topic. Meanwhile, any editor is welcome to visit the human biology source list to look up other sources, or indeed to suggest new sources. I have not yet logged in all the latest sources I have found, but I'll catch up with that gradually over the next few weeks, in between doing a lot of reading of the sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 13:44, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

The content that you removed in no way disputes the fact that sickle-cell screening is universal. All it says is that the disease itself is more prevalent in some population than others, which is stated in chapter 9 of the Whitmarsh book as well as in this source [2] This is what the Whitmarsh book says on the matter: "The prior probability of sickle-cell trait for a black infant is more than tenfold higher than the corresponding probability for a white infant. Various surveys have estimated the prevalence of sickle-cell trait in the United States to be about 250 per 100,000 population in self-identified whites, and in the range of 6,500 to 7,000 per 100,000 population in self-identified blacks."

If that’s the only specific problem you can describe about the content you removed, then it’s very easy to reword this sentence to provide further clarification that it’s referring to the distribution of these diseases rather than the screening for them. I could change this in the paragraph if no one else has the time.-SightWatcher (talk) 22:56, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Misuse of source I invite as many editors as are able to obtain a copy of Whitmarsh, Ian; Jones, David S., eds. (2010). What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51424-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) and look on while I edit this article to modify a paragraph that cites that source. As the source now appears in article text, the source's meaning is not correctly expressed. Of course it is possible to reach editorial consensus here about how to edit the paragraph in question by referring to reliable sources for medicine-related articles. I have gathered some new sources of that kind, and have posted citations in userspace for all of you to check and verify. My intention is to edit the paragraph to match what the source says and to add additional sources for more details. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 04:19, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Wait what? You said this misrepresented the source a month ago, I responded by quoting the parts of the book that support it. After I explained it you disappeared from this discussion for a month. But now you're here again, repeating the same claim. And making no effort to address my explanation of how I think the source supports what the article says. If you're going to restore your version of this again, please respond to my previous statements first.-SightWatcher (talk) 05:09, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was to Merge Miradre (talk) 18:02, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

There are a number of articles which all deal with ethnic groups/race/ancestral groups/population genetic structure groups and health. This is confusing and causes duplication. So I propose that they should be merged into one article.Miradre (talk) 12:37, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

There may be a mismatch in section "Racial mixtures of blacks and whites in modern America"

When you focus on Section 3 "Racial mixtures of blacks and whites in modern America" and read closely the 4th paragraph, especially the sentences -

(1)... Most of the free African-American families in Virginia in colonial years were the descendants of white women and African men. ...

(2) ... The admixture also reflects conditions under slavery, when African women were often taken advantage of by white planters or their sons, or overseers. ...

- then I feel not certain about whether those mixed marriages consisted of white woman with African man as it is mentioned in the first cited sentence. The concept of white plantagers exploiting African women seems to give more sense, but do not these two different versions presented in the 1st and 2nd sentence contradict each other?

Just a suggestion. Feel free to educate me on that. -J- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.179.12.39 (talk) 19:20, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

US centric

I'm aware that this article is US centric. Anyone have any sources that could help expand the scope? futurebird 17:35, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't have any sources, but as far as I know, there are several german studies concerning the health of turkish migrants/communication problems with doctors etc. in germany. Maybe that could be one direction to do further research? 87.160.227.109 11:34, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree - the current page should be merged into USA Race & Health- but I have a slight grievance as my own page - ethnicity and health - was designed to try and re-balance the debate from a UK/EU perspective based on work in UK - although i accept that i had not updated it recently and had been overtaken by other tasks - and now have forgotten most of what I knew about wiki editing! I am about to go on a refresher course and will undertake, if agreed, to restore and update the ethnicity page which focuses more on non-USa and less genetic emphasis on role of culture and ethnicity in health care - would this help? I did also write a chapter for a book, with a German colleague - on Turkish migrants and health research: not sure if we can cite that as it is not available online:

‘Representation of ethnic minorities in research – Necessity, opportunity and adverse effects’ in (Eds Lorraine Culley, Nicky Hudson and Floor van Rooij ) Marginalized Reproduction: Ethnicity, Infertility and Reproductive Technologies (Mark R D Johnson & Theda Borde) London: Earthscan 2009 Chapter 4 :64-80 (ISBN: 978-1-84407-576-8)

hope this helps

(Editor, the international journal "Diversity & Equality in Health & Care" ) Msrc (talk) 14:19, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

US bias - Merger proposal

The problem is that most of the countries don't even make statistics based on racial groups (particularly not on the American terminology of race). In most countries most statistics of this kind, if exist, exist on ethnicity and not race. I suggest merging it entirely with Race and health in the United States or renaming the article to Ethnicity and Health and completely rewriting it. Given that 'racial groups' are by definition a social construct it isn't surprising that it is written with regard to the dubious social constructs relating to a particular society. FonsScientiae (talk) 22:01, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

me again: vested interest in that i set up the original 'ethnicity and health' pages but have not been active in editing and correcting / checking it when was deleted! Sorry - there is a lot on this issue of the statistics basis and ways of recording - and social constructions of race. Not sure where to begin: maybe I need to retire fully from work and spend the rest of my life on the project.

for what it is worth, will set a watch list and try to respond and think - after I go on a refresher course at my University (De Montfort University) on editing Wikipedia, as we are trying to get into the 21st century in UK now...

would a resume of one of my chapters on 'monitoring diversity' be helpful? Msrc (talk) 14:50, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Should the "Race in biomedicine" article be merged with this article

Despite th name, the "Race in biomedicine" article is almost exclusively about genetic explanations and nothing else. Should it be merged to this article? Ultramarine 06:34, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I think so. futurebird 06:37, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Let's put up the "merge" banner. futurebird 06:37, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Done. I will merge in a day or two unless there are objections.Ultramarine 06:43, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Why would anyone who is not a racist want to take an article that is almost purely about genetics, and therefore scientifically defensible, and mess it up by throwing it in with all the mish-mash of imprecision etc. associated with [race]? To me that's like throwing a slightly misnamed article on "madness" into a context that supports the idea of witchcraft. Wouldn't it be better to isolate the truly scientific stuff regarding genetics and disease (and the empirically defensible stuff about mental illnesses) in an appropriately named article? I would prefer renaming "Race in biomedicine" to "Genetics in biomedicine." Then keep the "Race and health" article for all the cases where racism has an influence on health. In fact, why not rename this article as "Racism against health"? P0M 01:11, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

You make some good points. It might make more sense to rename the other article. I wonder what ultra thinks about all of this? futurebird 01:15, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

But, I also think that much of the material in that article supports ideas in this article. It'd help fill out the picture. Race differences in health are mostly about the environment. A few things, like skin cancer are probably about genetics and the environment. futurebird 01:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Genetics in biomedicine is an extremely broad topic. Researchers are looking for genetic factors in almost every disease and often finding some contribution. This has little to do with "race" in itself. Usually this means that if you have a relative with a certain disease, you yourself may have a higher risk due to shared genes.

I think that "Race and health" is a good title. This of course includes the effects on health of racism, but there may also be research on genetic differences in health related factors that is legitimate. At the very least there are some not-Pioneer Funded genetic researchers who think that "race" has some value when studying health, so this should be discussed.Ultramarine 10:17, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

True enough.futurebird 15:34, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

There are at least two things going on. [Race] is used as a stop-gap measure because it is easy to make a few superficial inquiries and categorize people according to [race] and those categorizations have some predictive value. But they have predictive value because, in an imprecise way, they rope in information about genetics, they rope in information about economics, they rope in information about the environments people are living in (Given a choice, will City Council put the toxic factors dump next to the poor whites in S. Philadelphia, or the poor blacks in W. Philadelphia? Well, if the mayor's name is Rizzo...), etc. But if doctors had the kind of information they really need they would have the genetic "profile" of an individual, his/her history of exposure to various bad factors in the natural and social environment, etc. People in medicine are challenging doctors to avoid snap judgments based on the presumed [race] of an individual patient. Being a certain color doesn't predict with certainty the efficacy or failure of a certain medication. Follow-up study of the patient is essential.P0M 19:53, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

These are valid points but I do not understand why they cannot be pointed out in this article? My main argument is that the titles "Race and health" and "Race and biomedicine" covers essentially the same tapic, so they should be the same article.Ultramarine 12:00, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Again I say: Make the title of the "Race and biomedicine" article fit its content since the authors do not have a strong set to see race as the master concept in the scientific study of medicine. Do not make the content of that article get lost to fit the current titles of the two articles. If you do you reduce clarity by replacing a discusion on gentics, which is a fairly clearly definable concept, with a discussion of a basket case. Risch has an interesting way of arguing for the validity of the concept of race, and it is one that I can accept, but it is not one that glosses over the basket case nature of this concept. P0M 00:57, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

You said it yourself: "Despite the name, the "Race in biomedicine" article is almost exclusively about genetic explanations and nothing else." Keep one article for genetics-only research and keep the other article for the shotgun "race" approach to discovering causal effects. If you just merge the articles then the distinction between race and genetics will be lost. P0M 05:06, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I think your point is that race is not a valid genetic concept. This is of course a valid view held by many people, but there are also serious researchers having the opposite view, that there are some races that are in some sense genetically distinct. This is discussed in the race article. Regardless, the result of scholarly studies using this assumption is a valid view and I think this is the correct place to put these sourced results. Either the race article or some a general genetics in biomedicine article article focus on a broader and more general overview. We should of course mention and link from here to the general discussion regarding whether race is valid genetic concept. Furthermore, even assuming this, it is as you state very questionable if doctors are helped by knowing that a member of a certain race have a slightly higher risk of a disease like hypertension. This is the right article to point this out.Ultramarine 08:21, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Non-genetic and non-racist factors

The section on "Eight separate Americas" needs to point out that there are at least three separate kinds of causal factors that may be involved:

Racist attitudes can have deleterious effects in themselves.
Racist attitudes can limit care provided.
Cultural attitudes can encourage detrimental choices. (I'm thinking of cultures that associate large amounts of meat, large amounts of fat, large amounts of alcohol, abstinence, etc., with success and/or survival.)
Cultural attitudes can encourage wise choices. (I'm thinking of the longevity of the Chinese people mentioned. How much does that have to do with the prevalence of dishes consisting of large quantities of various kinds of vegetables with only enough meat to provide flavoring. Japanese are believed to gain major health benefits from diets heavy in fish.)

The non-genetic factors can be associated with genetic factors simply because people isolated enough to have some degree of genetic specificity are also likely to have evolved their own cultural inventions.

One factor that is often remarked on is that some cultures can make people wary of seeking psychotherapy for fear of ostracism or at least negative reactions from their cohorts. The flip side is that some cultures may have institutions that maximize psychological nurture and mental health. P0M 23:48, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that study talked about causes. It just mentioned the size of the gaps... but, I'll take another look now... futurebird 01:16, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I didn't mean to imply that it did. I cooperated with one of the professors here who gave a course on psychological counseling techniques and once a year he would do something on how to try to talk to Chinese patients despite their fear that they would receive negative attention if they went to see "the crazy doctor." I'm pretty sure he encountered this idea in his own research, but I have no idea what his biblio was for that course. The odd thing is that Chinese people have had a two thousand year long tradition of going to teachers/philosophers for advice on how to handle the crazy making events of life. So seeking aid when your life is coming apart is nothing new to the culture. It's just that when it gets handled in a medical context and the word "abnormal" is attached then people take a different attitude toward it.

If we are concerned to educate people about the forces in life that they could bring to bear to ease their health problems, then a concern with culture would be one thing. I don't mean "which fork do you use for the shrimp" culture, but the kind of things that people invent to solve social problems or head them off before they start. I'm really impressed by the black people in this country who manage to cope on a daily basis. Somebody has learned some vital lessons and has inculcated them in others. For instance, Julian Bond came to Stanford in 1967 or thereabouts to give a talk to a roomful of Stanford students and whoever else showed up. He was driven down from the SF airport by a stunningly attractive woman his own age. (He was as handsome as she was beautiful, which may have a bearing on what happened next.) We got into the seminar room and the spaces around the long table filled up with people, most of them men and most of them looking like ordinary students. Then there was one 30ish white guy who almost immediate started to attack Julian Bond on the grounds that he was having sex with the young woman. A few of us made objections to what the white guy was saying. Finally a couple of us got really angry and I guess that we both had enough aggression in our voices to convince the guy that his mouth was going to get shut one way or another. But what I have never forgotten is that Julian Bond didn't have any apparent emotional reaction to the verbal attacks at all. He had a coping device that he got from his parents or his community that I certainly didn't have. Encouraging culture of this type is on the pro-active side of the game. I wish the parents of some of my 8th grade students could have talked to and guided some of the students whose parents hadn't prepared their children culturally for school. I don't mean that the kids should have been prepared to shut up and act nice or anything like that. Instead, I am thinking of a girl named Mamie who could concentrate on her schoolwork in the midst of absolute chaos. She had a clear idea of what she needed to get out of school, and nobody's disruptive behavior was going to get in her way. (Sadly, I wasn't a good enough teacher to do her much good.)

With regard to health, the problem for all people everywhere (at least those not forced on a subsistence diet by famine) is how to solve the life problems presented by the ready availability of foods that aren't good for one's health and to maximize the health-giving components. When I was in Taiwan I had a teacher who was tutoring foreign students in Chinese culture to make a living. He lived in cheap housing and he did not have a large budget for food. However, he was very careful about what he ate. He explained that part of his training growing up was in how to maintain a proper diet. He was 60 years old and looked no older than 40 at the time. So his approach to diet was to choose an extra sardine over an extra bowl of rice even though the rice would have sated his hunger and he didn't care for the taste of the sardine that would leave him a little hungry anyway. (My example, not his.)

The other place where education could make a big difference is in teaching people how to get health information, how to get appropriate medical care, etc. I worried about one of my friends in Philadelphia that, being on a very limited budget after her husband died, she might try to economize on health care. I wondered whether she felt she could approach hospitals that were largely run by white people. I wondered whether she could be assertive enough to get treatment when she needed it. (Even white doctors have problems on that score.) I wondered whether she made health choices on the basis of emotional reactions to various things in her past and in her current environment that would cause her to rationalize poor choices (e.g., on dietary choices). I expected that her church would help her with these issues, but the church may not have had the resources to even know how she should be guided, much less have the counseling skills to get her to change some patterns in her life. If they had all had good information (from something like Wikipedia, for instance), then things might have been much better for her in the last couple of years of her life. But getting the problem solving skills for health maintenance across to people may require the same kind of educational effort that prepared Julian Bond to deal with foul-mouthed racists without risking a heart attack.

I am basically saying that I hope that there is somebody out there who has written on these issues, someone whom we can quote. There ought to be lots written in the field of public health about how to use mass media and other approaches to get people to maintain a good diet, get needed immunization, etc. But I somehow doubt that much of it will be tailored to the categories of health education as they intersect with categories of [race]. There may be a little written on how to reach out to white people and make them aware that they ought to keep out of intense UV bombardments, how to reach out to blacks regarding heart disease, etc. But I will bet that there is not much written about how the white medical establishment needs to allay suspicion when they are trying to help a population that strongly suspects that even the doctors are part of the racist establishment and not to be trusted. Maybe I'm being unduly pessimistic. If so there ought to be plenty of "race and public health" articles out there somewhere.P0M 05:41, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Murray says he was surprised to find that lack of health insurance explained only a small portion of those gaps. Instead, differences in alcohol and tobacco use, blood pressure, cholesterol and obesity seemed to drive death rates.

Most important, he says, will be pinpointing geographically defined factors such as shared ancestry, dietary customs, local industry and which regions are more or less prone to physical activity.

Murray is a bit behind the curve. No mention of racism. Shared ancestry? Well, maybe a little, but that's not the lion's share of the cause... What is it with guys named Murray from Harvard? futurebird 01:20, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Before he wrote the Bell Curve he wrote another book in which he said that living in limited economic circumstances did not force communities to have a bad social environment. He pointed to ways in which people living in Thai farming communities (in around the 1960s) had no indoor plumbing, no running water, no electrical power, etc., yet they did not feel poor and they did not experience heavy social problems. His observation at that time in his life was that culture was more important than other factors once you had at least enough food and water to live on. So I couldn't figure out where this other stuff came from in his Bell Curve.

I may not be following the right train of argument here, but what strikes me is that multiple factors protect people against things like alcohol.

On the socialization side, it has long been noticed in medical/psychiatric literature that Jewish people are very rarely alcoholics. The researchers noted that peer pressure to drink was short-circuited in the Jewish community because drinking alcohol was never a badge of adulthood. Children drank a little wine in the home in a socially appropriate situation. They learned that a little was good for you, and getting wasted made you a loser. The same thing happens in Chinese families.

On the physiological side, alcohol was invented early in Eurasian history, and distillation was also invented a long time ago. Not many people could afford to purchase large amounts of alcohol to consume, and people whose metabolism could not handle alcohol well became more and more outnumbered by people who survived alcohol consumption with few negative effects. So by the time cheap hard liquor became available, people were relatively well fixed to deal with the negative effects.

In the Americas, however, neither a cultural awareness of how to derive benefit rather than disaster from drinking was present, nor were the people genetically adapted to "fire water".

Obesity is a problem that comes with an overabundance of cheap calories. In times of near starvation, the people whose bodies do not waste a single calorie are the ones who survive. In the livestock industry, cows, pigs, and chickens who put on weight most efficiently are called "thrifty eaters." They are "thrifty" for the farmer because it costs less to feed them to market weight. A human who is a "thrifty eater" and raised on the cultural view that the ideal meal is a one-pound T-bone steak, well marbled with fat, and a heaping pile of french fried potatoes will very easily get fat. (People like me can eat and eat and eat and only build more muscle. If I were a cow I would have been culled and run through a meat grinder early in life because the farmer would have figured out that I would never make a steer worthy of being taken to the county fair, nor would my market price pay him back for all the corn I ate.) There is not much people can do about their genetic identities, but people who get educated about the outcomes of eating bad stuff can eat well and prosper without getting super sized. It's a cultural thing.

People like my orphan friends in Taiwan may grow up feeling that the world owes them a rich diet, and that denying themselves that rich diet would be to sentence themselves to the kind of deprivation that was imposed upon them in the orphanage. It's difficult to get people to change attitudes toward food when the attitudes come from adverse social conditions that needed to be opposed in order to secure one's own survival. I was away from Taiwan for 10 years. When I came back I ran into my old orphanage friends. All but one of the skinny little kids had turned into fat adults in a culture where obesity was rare and usually reserved for old people who led a sedentary life style. My friends enjoyed eating all that food, but it was probably killing them. P0M 19:53, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

[Race] is being used in medicine, whether I like it or not. Keep "race" in the title of this article.

Genetics is what needs to be used in medicine (along with other factors noted above). Rename the other article and let it concentrate on how medicine is learning to use scientific genetic information in its work.P0M 19:56, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

There is already a Medical genetics article. But the intersection of race and health/medicine is small sub-subject of this*. If there are objections to medicinal genetics in general, they should be in a broad article. If there are objections to genetics regarding health and races, that is a much narrower subject.Ultramarine 12:05, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

This? This what?????

Since there is a Medical genetics article, Race in biomedicine article should be merged with it, not with this article. P0M 05:06, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

For clarity I will reply in only section above.Ultramarine 08:07, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

This page must refer to "Native Americans" as "American Indians." There is no proof to support that they are the native population. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.255.21.150 (talk) 18:24, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Cheap Sources of Fat?

Under heading "Environmental Factors" second paragraph it is stated that "When populations become more urban, it increases the availability of cheap sources of fat."

Where do you find cheap sources of fat? Or any animal derived fat for that matter? The lard that is frequently found in supermarkets is not a food product! In fact you can buy it, unwrap it, and leave it outdoors, and no animal will touch it!

I sometimes think about the existence, somewhere, in some hidden location, of a giant mountain of fat composed of all the sweet morsels of fat trimming... then I stop daydreaming and come to the cold conclusion that all that fat is used in some industrial product such as soap. Perhaps the "rendering" mafia gets it...

Please edit that section to match reality or supply references. 67.206.183.100 (talk) 21:16, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Review for Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/UCSF Elective 2013

Hi Iieeeric, happy to review but best time would be before Friday 12/6/13. Let me know. Emhawkins (talk) 07:16, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Citations list useful for updating this article and related articles

You may find it helpful while reading or editing articles to look at a bibliography of Anthropology and Human Biology Citations, posted for the use of all Wikipedians who have occasion to edit articles on human genetics and related issues. I happen to have circulating access to a huge academic research library system at a university with an active research program in these issues (and to other academic libraries in the same large metropolitan area) and have been researching these issues sporadically since 1989. You are welcome to use these citations for your own research. You can help other Wikipedians by suggesting new sources through comments on that page. It will be extremely helpful for articles on human genetics to edit them according to the Wikipedia standards for reliable sources for medicine-related articles, as it is important to get these issues as well verified as possible. I invite all the rest of you to review the source list and suggest new sources for it, and meanwhile I'll add some of the better current sources to the further reading section of this article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 23:49, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Ive removed the further reading section which was much too large to be useful for a reader. I think these lists are more useful in general for editors than for readers, and especially when they are this large.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 19:08, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

I've actually discussed with a lot of members of the general public recently about what they look for when they read a Wikipedia article. (Well, all right, these are educated members of the general public with university degrees whom I meet in forums discussing parenting issues.) They pretty uniformly tell me that if a Wikipedia article provides a guide to further reading, then they think they get good value from the article. That has made me more willing than before to include more rather that fewer further reading references in most Wikipedia articles I edit, which seems to be in accord with Wikipedia policy as long as the suggested further reading materials are reliable sources. I am, of course, happy to discuss with fellow Wikipedians here which references might be the most accessible and helpful to lay readers--the kind of readers who make up most readers on Wikipedia. And of course if a particular work is used as a citation reference for updating the article (which would be worth doing soon), then the usual Wikipedia practice is not to list that work as a further reading reference. But until the article is updated, why not err (if this is error at all) in the direction of including more rather than less reliable information for readers of the encyclopedia? All the professionally edited print encyclopedias have suggestions for further reading, many of them quite specialized and technical. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 21:25, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

I understand your point, but wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not an annotated bibliography. Sources should be used to write the article, they are not the themselves content. Further reading sections are most useful when they present a few well selected sources, an entire academic bibliography doesnt help most people, and academics should know where to find it themselves. I have never seen a professional encyclopedia entry that had a longer further reading section than the entry itself. I think specifically for wikipedia erring on the side of less is better, because each source included needs to be supported by consensus otherwise further reading sections will quickly become new sites of editwarring.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:23, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

I was in an hour-long interview with four academic librarians yesterday that among other topics discussed how Wikipedia can support undergraduate students learning how to do research properly. Those librarians were contacted by the Wikimedia Foundation as part of an effort to build better linkages between academic libraries and active Wikipedia editors like us. So after I digest further what they said, I think I will restore to this article a trimmed list of further reading references, knowing full well that most readers of Wikipedia never see the article talk pages, but many read all the way down to the bottom of an article to see if the article suggests other sources for deeper research. In general, based on my conversation with the librarians yesterday, I expect to pickle myself in the current Wikipedia Manual of Style section on Further reading sections and then to expand rather than contract the further reading sections on the majority of the hundreds of pages that are on my watchlist. In the meanwhile, of course, I encourage you and all of our fellow editors to use the full list of reliable sources that you kindly moved here to expand and update the actual article text. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 19:44, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

I don't think you should restor it without prior conensus for each title. Also I think you should drop the quotes, which will be necessity be cherrypicked to show a particular point. If you feel that you can include further reading items without prior consensus, then other people can too. This is not a sustainable path in these articles.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 22:43, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Journal articles and book chapters

Barbujani, Guido; Colonna, Vincenza (15 September 2011). "Chapter 6: Genetic Basis of Human Biodiversity: An Update". In Zachos, Frank E.; Habel, Jan Christian (eds.). Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas. Springer. pp. 97–119. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20992-5_6. ISBN 978-3-642-20992-5. Retrieved 23 November 2013. The massive efforts to study the human genome in detail have produced extraordinary amounts of genetic data. Although we still fail to understand the molecular bases of most complex traits, including many common diseases, we now have a clearer idea of the degree of genetic resemblance between humans and other primate species. We also know that humans are genetically very close to each other, indeed more than any other primates, that most of our genetic diversity is accounted for by individual differences within populations, and that only a small fraction of the species' genetic variance falls between populations and geographic groups thereof. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |laysummary= and |laydate= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Barbujani, Guido; Ghirotto, S.; Tassi, F. (2013). "Nine things to remember about human genome diversity". Tissue Antigens. 82 (3): 155–164. doi:10.1111/tan.12165. ISSN 0001-2815. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (September 2007). "Human Evolution and Its Relevance for Genetic Epidemiology". Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. 8. Annual Reviews: 1–15. doi:10.1146/annurev.genom.8.080706.092403. ISBN 978-0-8243-3708-7. ISSN 1527-8204. PMID 17408354. Retrieved 23 November 2013. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)
Hawks, John (2013). "Significance of Neandertal and Denisovan Genomes in Human Evolution". Annual Review of Anthropology. 42. Annual Reviews: 433–449, 438. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155548. ISBN 978-0-8243-1942-7. ISSN 0084-6570. Retrieved 4 January 2014. The shared evolutionary history of living humans has resulted in a high relatedness among all living people, as indicated for example by the very low fixation index (F_ST) among living human populations. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Johnson, Wendy; Penke, Lars; Spinath, Frank M. (2011). "Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not" (PDF). European Journal of Personality. 25 (4): 287–294. doi:10.1002/per.835. ISSN 0890-2070. Archived from the original on 2011. Retrieved 15 December 2013. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |archivedate= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
Lee, Sandra; Mountain, Joanna; Koenig, Barbara; Altman, Russ; Brown, Melissa; Camarillo, Albert; Cavalli-Sforza, Luca; Cho, Mildred; Eberhardt, Jennifer; Feldman, Marcus; Ford, Richard; Greely, Henry; King, Roy; Markus, Hazel; Satz, Debra; Snipp, Matthew; Steele, Claude; Underhill, Peter (2008). "The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics" (PDF). Genome Biology. 9 (7): 404. doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-7-404. ISSN 1465-6906. Retrieved 3 December 2013. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |displayauthors= ignored (|display-authors= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
Novembre, John; Ramachandran, Sohini (2011). "Perspectives on Human Population Structure at the Cusp of the Sequencing Era" (PDF). Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. 12: 245–274. doi:10.1146/annurev-genom-090810-183123. ISBN 978-0-8243-3712-4. ISSN 1527-8204. PMID 21801023. Archived from the original on 9 September 2011. Retrieved 23 November 2013. Surveys of population structure have been ongoing for decades, but in the past three years, single-nucleotide-polymorphism (SNP) array technology has provided unprecedented detail on human population structure at global and regional scales. These studies have confirmed well-known relationships between distantly related populations and uncovered previously unresolvable relationships among closely related human groups. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group (2005). "The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research". American Journal of Human Genetics. 77 (4): 519–32. doi:10.1086/491747. PMC 1275602. PMID 16175499. Retrieved 23 September 2013. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

Basic information missing?

Comment deleted, wrong article. Arnold Rothstein1921 (talk) 21:06, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

New review articles on human population genetics based on studies of ancient DNA

Wikipedia has a lot of interesting articles based on the ongoing research in human molecular genetics that helps trace the lineage of people living in various places on the earth. I've been reading university textbooks on human genetics "for fun" since the 1980s, and for even longer I've been visiting my state flagship university's vast BioMedical Library to look up topics on human medicine and health care policy. On the hypothesis that better sources build better articles as all of us here collaborate to build an encyclopedia, I thought I would suggest some sources for improving articles on human genetic history and related articles. The Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine provide a helpful framework for evaluating sources.

The guidelines on reliable sources for medicine remind editors that "it is vital that the biomedical information in all types of articles be based on reliable, third-party, published sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."

Ideal sources for such content includes literature reviews or systematic reviews published in reputable medical journals, academic and professional books written by experts in the relevant field and from a respected publisher, and medical guidelines or position statements from nationally or internationally recognised expert bodies.

The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that all "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources" (emphasis in original). They helpfully define a primary source in medicine as one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. By contrast, a secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources, usually to provide an overview of the current understanding of a medical topic. The general Wikipedia guidelines let us know that "Articles should rely on secondary sources whenever possible. For example, a review article, monograph, or textbook is better than a primary research paper. When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised: Wikipedians should never interpret the content of primary sources for themselves."

Two review articles in prominent journals about human population genetics are bringing together analysis of the many recent studies of human DNA, including DNA from ancient individuals.

Hawks, John (2013). "Significance of Neandertal and Denisovan Genomes in Human Evolution". Annual Review of Anthropology. 42. Annual Reviews: 433–449, 438. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155548. ISBN 978-0-8243-1942-7. ISSN 0084-6570. Retrieved 4 January 2014. The shared evolutionary history of living humans has resulted in a high relatedness among all living people, as indicated for example by the very low fixation index (F_ST) among living human populations. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Pickrell, Joseph K.; Reich, David (September 2014). "Toward a new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA". Trends in Genetics. 30 (9): 377–389, 378. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2014.07.007. PMC 4163019. PMID 25168683. Retrieved 16 September 2014. However, the data also often contradict models of population replacement: when two distinct population groups come together during demographic expansions the result is often genetic admixture rather than complete replacement. This suggests that new types of models – with admixture at their center – are necessary for describing key aspects of human history ([14–16] for early examples of admixture models). {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Earlier studies of this issue were based on more limited samples (fewer genes, and fewer human individuals from fewer regions and only recent times). As more samples of more genes from more individuals from more places and times are gathered, the molecular evidence is making it increasingly clear that human beings have been moving back and forth across the Earth's surface and mixing genes over long distances ever since their earliest ancestors moved out of the human homeland in Africa. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 15:53, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Persistent sock edits

I hope administrators are aware that this article is being repeatedly visited by new sockpuppets of a previously banned editor. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 19:26, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

@WeijiBaikeBianji: Another account by the same editor has vandalized an article today: see Special:Contributions/Scott101110. Jarble (talk) 06:12, 11 December 2014 (UTC)