EthnicMajority

(Current) Genomics research, in which researchers scan subjects' DNA in search of the genetic basis of many diseases, has focused too narrowly on studying subjects of European descent, write a team of genetics experts in the journal Nature this week.

The Los Angeles Times spoke with one of the authors of the piece, Stanford population geneticist and 2010 MacArthur Fellow Carlos D. Bustamante, about why scientists should focus on sequencing genomes of people from other ethnic groups, too.

This commentary stems from conversations [coauthors] Esteban [Gonzalez Burchard], Francisco [De La Vega] and I have been having over the past couple of years. How do we think about taking a lot of what’s been in development in European populations and apply it to other populations?

Genome-wide association studies — when you go out and take individuals with a disease and those without and find genetic changes that predict who is in which group — have been very successful. The vast majority of those studies have been conducted with subjects of European descent.

Now there’s also a burgeoning explosion of these in East Asian populations, led in part by the BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, which we mention in the Nature commentary.

But the rest of the world is being left behind, and we view that as problematic. Something like 96% of the participants in medical genomics studies are of European descent. It’s a hugely lopsided representation.

Here in the U.S. some of the people with the worst health outcomes are members of minority populations.

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(Examiner.com) Phoenix Latino civil rights groups Chicanos Unidos Arizona, Nuestros Reconquistos, and Take Back Aztlán met at the Phoenix Public Library Monday morning to support Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity efforts . There has been some backlash against her efforts, but Cecilia Maldonado of Chicanos Unidos Arizona feels Michelle Obama is doing the right thing.

“Latino children need to learn about the negative effects of obesity, especially since they are already discriminated against because of their skin color. Michelle Obama has pledged to help get the message to Latino children and we praise her for that.

Manuel Longoria of Nuestros Reconquistos believes that places like McDonalds, Taco Bell, and other fast food restaurants should be banned. “These fast food places have caused millions of heart attacks and are bad for children of all races.”

(SFGate) The titillating twists and turns of this Spanish-language soap opera captivated Colorado Hispanics.

But instead of stories of forbidden love and revenge, its plot twists involved health issues affecting Hispanics and the services the state provides — all told with the dramatic flair for which telenovelas are famous.

Think soap opera meets after-school special.

Health officials say they got a resounding response from 2009's Denver-area series, titled "Encrucijada: Sin Salud No Hay Nada," or "Crossroads: Without Health, There Is Nothing."

Three surveys provided to The Associated Press this week on its impact showed that thousands of viewers called a help line to ask about issues on the show, and most said they found the show beneficial. One night, 35,000 households tuned in, according to Nielsen ratings.

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(The News Tribune) Sixteen years ago, soon after she gave birth to her first baby, Maricela Mares-Alatorre joined residents of three small California farmworker towns who alleged they were being discriminated against by environmental regulators, because all three of the state's toxic waste dumps were located in or near poor rural Latino communities.

But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which received that civil rights complaint when Bill Clinton was president, hasn't addressed it and all the dumps continue to operate.

Trucks filled with PCBs, benzene, and asbestos continue to pass within three miles of Mares-Alatorre's home in Kettleman City on their way to one of the country's biggest toxic landfills, where they're treated, stored or buried. That dump and another one, in Buttonwillow, are in the state's sprawling Central Valley, while the third is to the south, just outside the hamlet of Westmorland.

A federal suit filed in Fresno, Calif., last week by a community group founded by Mares-Alatorre's parents and another community organization alleges that the EPA has failed to respond to the complaint within the mandated period. Mares-Alatorre's 16-year-old son is part of the group that filed the lawsuit.

Environmental groups claim the case is proof of the long-standing neglect of environmental justice by previous administrations, and they argue it casts doubts on whether the administration of President Barack Obama has made it a priority.

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(Science Daily) Nursing homes in the United States are shrinking and their residents are becoming proportionately more black, more Hispanic, more Asian, and less white, according to a new study by Brown University researchers. The nationwide trend, reflected in metropolitan areas from New York to Los Angeles, results from changing demographics and disparities in what people can afford. The study is published in the July edition of Health Affairs.

In the last decade, minorities have poured into nursing homes at a time when whites have left in even greater numbers, according to a new Brown University study that suggests a racial disparity in elder care options in the United States.

At first blush the analysis, published July 7 in the journal Health Affairs, suggests that elderly blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are gaining greater access to nursing home care. But the growing proportion of minorities in nursing homes is coming about partly because they do not have the same access to more desirable forms of care as wealthier whites do, said the study's lead author Zhanlian Feng, assistant professor of community health in the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

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(Huffington Post) Latinos suffer from wide ranging health disparities in comparison to non-Hispanic whites. They are twice as likely, for example, as non-Hispanics of the same age, to have diabetes and to develop complications from diabetes such as heart disease, high blood pressure, blindness, kidney disease, amputations and nerve damage. While we know these disparities are caused by a combination of environmental and genetic factors, we don't know to what degree each are involved for many conditions disproportionately affecting Latinos. That's where modern genomics comes into play.

With the Human Genome Project complete for over a decade, the benefits of genomic data
are now trickling into the business and practice of medicine. The passage of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act in 2008 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010 have set the rules of the road, and made the critical investments necessary to lay the ground work for new advances in American genomics research. In the coming years, as the price of whole-genome scans come down and the medical community enters a new era of personalized medicine, we will have a new set of tools with which to study the origin of diseases affecting specific populations.

Genetics can reveal useful information about an individual's health status, but they can also reveal unexpected information about group identity. The Latino community is both genetically and culturally diverse; and as gene-based medicine advances, Latinos will need to make sure that new medical technologies serve that diversity.

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(Hartford Courant) According to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine, cigarette companies use racial profiling to target young African Americans to sell more menthol cigarettes.

For the study, published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, researchers surveyed convenience stores and other cigarette retailers within easy walking distance of 91 schools in California. What they found was that the greater the population of African American students, the greater the amount of menthol cigarette advertisements. Further, they found that there was a greater chance that prices for menthol cigarettes would go down.

The study comes at a time when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering a ban on menthol cigarettes. It is reviewing a report from the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee that concludes that menthol makes smoking more palatable and possibly more addictive. The Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee was created under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. That act allowed the FDA to ban candy- and fruit-flavored cigarettes. Menthol was among the flavors considered at the time for banning, but the FDA opted not to at the time.

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(ABC Chicago) Will graphic new warning labels on cigarette packs help stem the rising number of Asian-Americans who are picking up the habit?

The Food and Drug Administration just released new cigarette warning labels which feature graphic pictures of the dangers of tobacco use.

In large immigrant communities, like Chinatown, smoking rates are well above the national average. Many smokers began their habit in Asian countries where smoking is more common, and because of language and cultural barriers, they find it difficult to find the support needed to quit.

They are illegal to sell in the United States, but that hasn’t kept Chinese cigarettes emblazoned with the symbol for good fortune from finding a large market in Chicago’s Chinatown. It’s part of the uphill battle faced by anti-smoking groups in that neighborhood.

“Our population is more socially isolated in an ethnic enclave. And so they don’t receive health messages through the mainstream media,” said Meme Wang, Asian Health Coalition.

A recent study commissioned by the Asian Health Coalition found that one in three men in Chinatown smokes, well above rates for Chicago and the nation.

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(CNN) Alexandra Dixon was born with a hole in her lower back, exposing her spinal cord, a condition called spina bifida. Within 48 hours, she had two surgeries to begin correcting her birth defect: One to close the hole and another to insert a cerebral shunt – a tube moving excess fluid from her head to prevent excessive pressure on the brain. In her 29 years, Dixon has had 18 surgeries to correct this birth defect – a type of neural tube defect (NTD), which can kill many infants and put others in wheelchairs for life.

Each year about 3,000 babies are born with neural tube defects in the United States, including the one Dixon had, and the highest rates are found among Hispanics compared to other racial or ethnic groups.

So the March of Dimes is calling on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow food producers to fortify corn masa flour with the B vitamin folic acid, which “could prevent more serious birth defects of the brain and spine in the Hispanic community,” according to a March of Dimes commentary published in the American Journal of Public Health.

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(Ethnicmajority, Clifford Tong) Last week a study was published by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research showing one in five American moms had children with more than one birth father. This type of family structure is even more common among minority women: 59% for African American, and 35% for Hispanic mothers.

While one might think this is attributed to teenage unwed mothers having boatloads of kids before they reach voting age, the data show that this is not the case. 43% of the women who had kids with multiple fathers were married at the time they had their first child. This is indicative that many of these families are the by-product of divorce, not unwed mothers.

Although this is relatively new research and some of the results seem inconclusive, I’m ready to jump to some conclusions. I think it is pretty clear that women have generally waited longer to get married and have children, for a variety of reasons. And although divorce rates are high, children of divorce should have a better chance at a stable household given that their parents are more likely to be mature and financially viable enough to provide it. So I think this age trend is pushing the statistics down, not up.

That means that the data, and more importantly the impact on the children, is still heavily skewed toward mothers who are young, unwed, uneducated, low income, and minority. Given these characteristics, there are many geographical areas where this is the cultural norm, where having a baby is viewed as a short-term status symbol rather than the life commitment and challenge that it is.

Whatever we’re doing to educate our young people about teenage pregnancy, it’s not working. This sounds like a cultural norm that is an epidemic.