Kamikaze Pilot
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Marriage between cousins and other blood relatives should be delegitimized, criminalized and actively discouraged in Pakistan. Awareness should be spread about medical repercussion of such marriages. Law should be created to make this kind of marriage illegal. Marriage among blood relatives should be banned.
Children born from such marriages have high chance of being defective. Even if the defect is recessive, they are dormant and may surface in subsequent generations. If the practice of marriage between blood relations continues the small defects may accumulate and become unacceptable.
The biology of first cousin marriages
That marriages between blood relations might lead to health issues for the child has been suspected for several years. Now, a detailed analysis of the issue involving over 11,000 children, born out of consanguineous marriages, revealed congenital anomalies in 386 of them. This figure of 3 per cent contrasts with the 1.6 per cent in children born of out of non-blood-relations unions. Dr Eamonn Sheridan and associates from leads, U.K. analysed these babies termed “Born in Bradford” to obtain these results. Bradford is a small area in the UK where Pakistani Muslims constitute 16.8 per cent of the population. A close knit group, they practice consanguinity; 75 per cent of them marry first cousins.
Babies born out of such wedlock could have a multiplicity of congenital problems. Heart problems top the list, followed by nervous disorders, limb anomalies and so forth. Sheridan and colleagues also studied the lifestyle, smoking and drinking habits, income and poverty and other factors that might contribute, and found that consanguinity is the leading culprit. They have published their analysis in the July 4 issue of The Lancet.
The problem in such close relative marriages surfaces when one of the partners carries a defect in any of the genes associated with some form of illness. When you marry within the community with one who may also have such a family defect, the child inherits two copies of this faulty gene, and thus has the defect. But when you marry outside the community, you bring in genes from a much larger gene pool, and the odds that the child will inherit the problem reduce remarkably.
Of course, the prevalence in Bradford is but 3 per cent. Most of the children are normal and as healthy as those born from non-cousin marriages. Also, lest someone conclude otherwise, this does not reflect against either Pakistan or Islam. The researchers found the Bradford group to be a large enough and inbred group where a study of this kind would have statistical significance. And while 37 per cent of Pakistani marriages in the U.K. were between cousins, it was only 1 per cent of all marriages in U.K. (A single swallow a summer does not make but here was a large flock of swallows). Similar studies, with smaller “catchment populations” have been done with Gypsies, the Arabs in Jerusalem, the Parsis and even on South Indians (largely Hindu) by Dr Kumaramanickavel (then at Sankara Nethralaya, Chennai) in 2002 (Community Genetics 2002, 5:180-185) with similar results.
The biology of first cousin marriages - The Hindu
Children born from such marriages have high chance of being defective. Even if the defect is recessive, they are dormant and may surface in subsequent generations. If the practice of marriage between blood relations continues the small defects may accumulate and become unacceptable.
The biology of first cousin marriages
That marriages between blood relations might lead to health issues for the child has been suspected for several years. Now, a detailed analysis of the issue involving over 11,000 children, born out of consanguineous marriages, revealed congenital anomalies in 386 of them. This figure of 3 per cent contrasts with the 1.6 per cent in children born of out of non-blood-relations unions. Dr Eamonn Sheridan and associates from leads, U.K. analysed these babies termed “Born in Bradford” to obtain these results. Bradford is a small area in the UK where Pakistani Muslims constitute 16.8 per cent of the population. A close knit group, they practice consanguinity; 75 per cent of them marry first cousins.
Babies born out of such wedlock could have a multiplicity of congenital problems. Heart problems top the list, followed by nervous disorders, limb anomalies and so forth. Sheridan and colleagues also studied the lifestyle, smoking and drinking habits, income and poverty and other factors that might contribute, and found that consanguinity is the leading culprit. They have published their analysis in the July 4 issue of The Lancet.
The problem in such close relative marriages surfaces when one of the partners carries a defect in any of the genes associated with some form of illness. When you marry within the community with one who may also have such a family defect, the child inherits two copies of this faulty gene, and thus has the defect. But when you marry outside the community, you bring in genes from a much larger gene pool, and the odds that the child will inherit the problem reduce remarkably.
Of course, the prevalence in Bradford is but 3 per cent. Most of the children are normal and as healthy as those born from non-cousin marriages. Also, lest someone conclude otherwise, this does not reflect against either Pakistan or Islam. The researchers found the Bradford group to be a large enough and inbred group where a study of this kind would have statistical significance. And while 37 per cent of Pakistani marriages in the U.K. were between cousins, it was only 1 per cent of all marriages in U.K. (A single swallow a summer does not make but here was a large flock of swallows). Similar studies, with smaller “catchment populations” have been done with Gypsies, the Arabs in Jerusalem, the Parsis and even on South Indians (largely Hindu) by Dr Kumaramanickavel (then at Sankara Nethralaya, Chennai) in 2002 (Community Genetics 2002, 5:180-185) with similar results.
The biology of first cousin marriages - The Hindu
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