If you are a student here at UNC Chapel Hill and were in the
The FDA recently approved a medication, BiDil, for heart failure with a race qualification that it was only to be used by self identified African Americans. Genetic profiling is a very valuable tool in many fields, including identifying trends in disease occurrence. It is well known that certain diseases and conditions (such as sickle cell anemia and hypertension) are more prevalent in people of certain races. But the debate comes when doctors and scientists have to decide whether these trends are due to genetics or environment. In many cases there is not a single gene that can be linked to a specific disease, so one would wonder how medications could be made specifically for one race or another based on genetics.
It might surprise you that the FDA would even be presented with a medication that was only to be used by a certain race, but in many ways the federal government has created the market for race specific medicine. With all of the gains our country has made with civil rights in the last 50 years or so, policy for everything from education to medical testing had to change. It used to be that in experimental groups to test how effective medicines were was made up of only white males. At first you might not think that that would have anything to do with anything, but now with all of the advents in medical information, there is now a better understanding that different sexes and races may respond to medications differently. Thus it became mandated by government that all test groups contain members of different sexes and races. There have been variations with how inclusive the tests must be in regards to race, some with only six racial groups included (North America/Caribbean, South America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, Africa, and Middle East), while some groups have pushed for broader inclusion, with more specific racial identities (such as Africans South of the Sahara, Ashkenazi Jews, Czechoslovakian people, and even Mexican American residents of Los Angeles).
I think one concern that the public might have, although it is not explicitly discussed in the article since it is not scientific in nature, is that this could slowly become a new form of discrimination. If your medicines are proscribed based on your race, who is to say that we might not relapse into conditions like our past, where everything seemed to be separate and almost nothing was equal. It cannot be denied that there are still racist, prejudiced people in our country, and it might not be crazy to be worried that if racial divisions became prominent and accepted again that some people might take it way too far.
In many ways, this development of medicine shows how far we have come. We can now realize exactly how certain types of people can react to specific medicines and with that knowledge we are working to make each medication as safe and effective as possible. However it also raises the controversy concerning genetics and its full understanding. There are still many people who are alarmed by the held belief that race is actually determined genetically. Some of those people feel that science could be used as support for racist attitudes and eventually action. Like the problems that have risen with morality issues and birth control in pharmacies, one could imagine that if a certain pharmacist or group of pharmacists decided not to carry a medicine meant for one race or another that it could evolve into a very serious national problem. This is a situation that will probably be much more thoroughly investigated before anything goes to the general public. Based on my understanding, most people are still unaware that this drug even exists, much less that it has been approved by the FDA. And while I’m not sure where all of this debate will lead, I can admit that I never thought I would see the day when I was not permitted to take a medication based on my race, even if it was designed with everyone’s medical safety in mind.
Genes, Race, and Population: Avoiding a Collision of Categories, Kahn, Jonathan: American Journal of Public Health; Nov2006, Vol. 96 Issue 11, p1965-1970, 6p
1 comment:
Good job, Ellyn. This is an extremely interesting topic and you summarize the article well. My biggest criticism of the post if your method of citation. Your works cited list at the end is fine, but it was difficult to tell which information in the post was your own analysis and what you were getting from the article. For instance, I wonder about your assertion that most test subjects for medicine used to be white males; I would have thought that minorities would have been more prominent in older tests because of the methods used to gather test subjects. In the future make sure it's clear where the ideas your summarize or paraphrase are coming from.
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