Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Health Care and Race

Reuters has reported that "[h]ealth officials may be wrong in attempts to match health care and especially drugs with race, because genetically there is no such thing," according to gene experts. Those experts "praised the U.S. Food And Drug Administration for trying to formulate guidance that would take genetics into account when testing drugs, but said using simple notions of race was not the way to go." According to the report, "Several teams of scientists have found that there are more genetic differences among Africans from different regions, for example, than there are between Africans and Europeans." Thus, several geneticists have argued that "self-reported race is irrelevant. ’It would be inaccurate to check off any one box on the U.S. census if you were African-American or Caucasian because to some degree we all admixed . . . . Six million people have actually changed, between censuses, their racial classification, so we are using social constructs to try and define very important scientific issues.’" Their conclusion: "Better to design individual genetic tests to use on a patient-by-patient basis." Imagine that, one less reason for government programs to consider race.

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