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3 | THE MAROON TIGER
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2003
NEWS
OUR WORLD
AROUND THE GLOBE
MIDDLE EAST
• Kofi Annan condemns
Israeli air strike on
suspected Palestinian
militant training camp
• Yasser Arafat appoints
an emergency cabinet in
response to renewed
Israeli threats to expel him
ASIA
South Korea announces plans to
move US military base from capital.
North Korea makes plans to ready
plutonium for weapons.
AMERICAS
• Chile debates the
legalization of divorce
• Colombia now has one of
the highest numbers of
children soldiers in the
world
• United States rejoins
United Nations Educational
and Scientific Organization
(UNESCO) after 18-year
absence
AFRICA
• Nigeria experiences a 12% increase
in fuel prices due to deregulation
• Looted biblical manuscript returns
to Ethiopia after 135 years
upcoming elections in the
Russian Republic of
Chechnya
Arnold: newly
elected Governor of
California
Arnold Sharwzenegger and wife, Maria Shriver,
celebrate victory.
ARNOLD continued from page 1
not fail you.”
Incumbent Governor Davis
replied, “We’ve had a lot of good
nights over the last 20 years, but
tonight the people did decide that
it’s time for someone else to
serve, and I accept their
judgment.”
Tuesday’s gubernatorial
election was, indeed, one of the
most highly contested events in
California’s history. Art Torres,
chairman of the state’s
Democratic Party, explained the
results by saying, “People were
angry at the governor,”
especially given the state’s
mounting economic problems.
The recall galvanized an
astonishing 2.2 million absentee
ballots. Among this list was
Morehouse senior Ryan Drake-
Lee who commented, “They
have made the event into a 135-
ring circus [referring to the
number of candidates on the
ballot]. Some things have gone
wrong, but none of Gray’s
opponents to me appear more
qualified than him.”
Schwarzenegger will
assume office within ten days of
the official vote certification,
which must be completed by
November 15, according to the
state election code. Democratic
candidate and gubernatorial
runner-up Cruz Bustamante will
continue to serve as lieutenant
governor of California.
Compiled by John Thomas and Marcus Newman
DMA continued from page 1
blood pressure, diabetes, prostate and breast
cancers, and asthma It’s about time that
someone really looked into this.
“Presumably, Howard University has
been persuaded by some evidence - and they
would need to say what evidence - that there
are some genetic differences or enough of a
possibility of genetic differences between
black Americans and other Americans that
such a genetic survey is warranted for
potential medical benefits,” Dr. John Mercer,
a Duke University biologist, said in an email
interview.
Despite the controversy surrounding
the research, Howard University’s findings
can be positively applied to the scientific and
medical communities.
“(A) possibility is that the black
population has been underrepresented in
epidemiological studies that use genetics,”
Dr. Mercer said. “One possible benefit
would be that researchers might be able to
locate markers for disease-related genes and
ultimately genes responsible for diseases or
susceptibilities to diseases that
disproportionately strike blacks.
“This would be first in a series of steps
towards better diagnosis, identifying
individuals for early intervention,
ameliorating therapies, or even cures for
these diseases,” Dr. Mercer continued.
And Howard isn’t alone. The
International HapMap Project, an initiative
of The National Institutes of Health, involves
a $100 million effort to identify disease-
causing polymorphisms by analyzing
genetic patterns in blood samples taken from
people in Nigeria, Japan, and China, and
from people of northern and western
European ancestry in the U. S. Although
research has shown that the DNA sequence
of any two people is 99.9 percent alike,
regardless of race, these subtle variations in
genetic structure, or polymorphisms, can
greatly affect an individual’s risk of disease.
The problem: disease and health
disparity between not only blacks and
whites, but also other ethnic groups has
already been looked into; but like so many
things that slip below the public and political
radar, the answers weren’t sexy enough.
Let’s take asthma, for example.
According to Minority Lung Disease Data
for2000 as published by the American Lung
Association, although mainland Puerto
Ricans have the highest incidence rates of
asthma, black Americans are mshed to the
emergency room for asthma attacks at four
times the rate of whites or those of other
races and black children are three times as
likely as whites to be hospitalized for
treatment of asthma Bad genes, you say?
No, poor education, living conditions and
little to no access to health care should be
the obvious answer.
In July 1999, Mount Sinai School of
Medicine published research in the Journal
of Asthma showing that hospitalization rates
for asthma in New York City were as much
as 21 times higher in low-income
neighborhoods and in areas where the
population was predominantly of minority
race. Despite higher incidence, the American
Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care
Medicine published that African American
patients with asthma enrolled in a managed
care organization were 36 percent less likely
than their white counterparts overall to visit
an asthma specialist and filled fewer
prescriptions for inhaled steroids, although
this is a “mainstay of treatment for chronic
asthma.”
Taken a step further, Harvard
University researchers asserted as early as
2000 that stress related to living in high crime
areas may contribute to asthma among urban
minority children. Children under the age
of 26 months who live in areas with higher
levels of violent crime are up to twice as
likely to have physician-diagnosed asthma
as those who live in low crime areas. Harvard
researchers have also shown that despite the
fact that residential segregation in the U.S.
has declined for three straight decades
according to Census figures, such
segregation has shown evidence of disparity
in health treatment and outcomes for black
and other minority Americans. Apparently
the discovery that air particles, sulfur dioxide,
and overexposure to ozone (all prevalent in
minority communities) and limited access
to quality healthcare has affected the increase
in asthma incidence among black children
is not solid enough science to take action.
When it comes to genetics, Richard
Lewontin, a professor emeritus at Harvard
University, is a scholar on the subject and
has been cited everywhere from the article
“Race and Human Genetic Variability” by
Morehouse Professor Dr. Daniel Klenbort
urging the limit of racial categories to nothing
more than a social and political construct, to
a Scientific American profile claiming that
DNA could be used to determine if a person
is black or white. Professor Lewontin asserts
that “the genetic differences between any
two randomly selected individuals in one
socially recognized population account for
85 percent of the variation one might find
between people of separate populations.”
More siinply put: the genetic difference
between two individuals of the same race
can be greater than those between individuals
of different races.
Dr. Mercer reminds us that not all uses
of genetics are so benign.
‘ The ability to diagnose a susceptibility
to disease in an individual could result in
denial of medical insurance,” Dr. Mercer
said. “These problems are not specific to
any race, and hopefully our society will
ethically engage these questions as more and
more genetic knowledge becomes
available.”