2/1/2005 03:15:08 PM|||Dave|||Here’s a great example of how PC aversions to any and all scientific evidence establishing biological differences between males and females, or between one race and another, leads to absurdity and rote sloganeering. I’ve excerpted only some of the story below. The rest of the article addresses some fascinating political dimensions – FDA’s position, patent rights, and selection criteria - surrounding the new drug’s release. (Hat tip: Rich Hoeckh)
(CBS/AP), Nov. 8, 2004 - A two-drug combination pill dramatically reduced deaths among blacks with heart failure, a landmark finding that is expected to lead to government approval of the first medication marketed for a specific race.
Black cardiologists hailed this form of racial profiling after years in which minorities got short shrift in medical studies. Others complained that the drug also might help whites and should have been tested in them, but wasn't for business reasons.
"At times you can't win," said Dr. Augustus Grant, past president of the Association of Black Cardiologists, which supported the study. "Here we have a wonderful trial that shows a clear result and the issue is raised, `Why was this trial only done in African Americans?"'…
But could this launch an era of medicine in black and white? Critics warn that race-only drugs, which may be good medicine, could also feed the disease of racism, reports CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews.
"It's a message that translates into saying there's a biological basis for race, African Americans are inferior to other groups, ethnic and racial groups," argues Patricia King, a law professor at Georgetown University.
Heart failure affects five million Americans, but blacks are two and a half times more likely to develop it. It happens when the heart is too weak to pump effectively, causing fluid to back up in the lungs and leaving people weak and short of breath. Half die within five years of diagnosis.
Earlier research suggested that standard heart failure drugs called ACE inhibitors do not work as well in blacks, and that blacks may have lower amounts of nitric oxide, which plays many roles in heart health, in their blood.
Two chemicals - isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine - boost this substance, but administering the right dose is complicated when they are prescribed separately. A Massachusetts biotechnology company, NitroMed, developed a combination pill, BiDil, that gets around this problem, but the FDA refused to license it as a new drug because earlier studies involving mostly white patients who got the chemicals separately showed no benefit…
Meanwhile, experts say it is a watershed event in efforts to develop race-based medicine.
"In 2001 it was almost a fringe concept" that was highly controversial, Yancy said. "The idea was that all this would do would be further polarize medicine and have practitioners make decisions based on race: What does this person look like? There has been a relaxing of the animosity about doing this kind of study."
Dr. Raymond Gibbons, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who had no role in the research, said: "To these investigators' credit, they didn't give up on the idea," and pursued testing the drug for blacks. "It's an admirable attempt to focus therapy on the group they thought would most benefit."
As my friend Rich H. noted, Patricia King’s comments in the story represent the patent PC response to such discoveries. Could someone please sit Ms. King down and explain to her: A) There are biological differences between races - e.g., skin pigmentation, body morphology, susceptibility to certain diseases and ailments, etc., and B) There are biological differences between men and women – e.g., I can pull down my pants to show you. Inconvenient bits of reality such as this cannot be wished away.
For example, within the nature/nurture debates, it is never likely to be either/or on any given item. Diet and choice (cultural factors) are certainly important in explaining why certain groups have much higher rates of heart failure, but when science discovers evidence of inherent biological variables (such as the story’s references to nitric oxide levels, different levels of responsiveness to various heart medications), the PC police come knocking at the door.
How anyone, such as King, can construe such empirical facts to directly translate into notions of ‘racial profiling’ or worse yet ‘inferiority’ is quite strange. Unfortunately, this type of knee-jerk reaction is today a behaviorally-conditioned response and consequence of the intense PC-brainwashing our culture has undergone in the past two decades. The fact that the new drug noted above will reduce heart failure among blacks by over 40% is, in PC-land, apparently trumped by the fact that some person(s) in some place(s) will be offended or believe their civil rights have been violated.
One can start to understand how Copernicus must have felt when he was forced to shelf, for over 30 years, his most famous discovery, simply because of the vicious cultural reaction to such a discovery.
|||110728900977191951|||FDA Faces 'Racial Medicine' Debate