Cystic fibrosis: the Celtic connection.

[Beorn]

Cystic fibrosis: the Celtic connection


<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top">The PC lobby may deny the existence of race, but nature has other ideas, says sean thomas (http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/atoz.php#thomas)

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</td> </tr> </tbody></table></td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top">http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/assets/images/spacer.gif
</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top">The news that Gordon Brown's second child has cystic fibrosis has provoked much sympathy. I share this reaction, not least because my own family has had similar experience of this severe and gruelling affliction.
But it's not a child's health that concerns me here, it's the child's ethnic background. Gordon Brown (right) is Scottish, and his wife, Sarah Macaulay, is Anglo-Scots. The couple in my family, who had the same experience as the Browns, were Scottish and Cornish. In other words, all Celts.
Is this coincidence? No. Scientists who study cystic fibrosis have long noted that this congenital ailment is most prevalent in people from a Celtic background. No one yet knows why, but there is no doubt that the disease does its worst in the regions of the Atlantic littoral of western Europe, through Brittany,
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Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. Put it another way: cystic fibrosis is one of those illnesses that divide by race, that attack one ethnic group more than another.
Such a starkly racial element must be perplexing to anyone who follows the official line on 'race'. Because the accepted position of the British Establishment on race, the official position of the academic elite, the official position of bien pensant authorities everywhere, is that race 'does not exist' - that race is a social construct, a psychic fiction, a chimera.
The EU has even written this wishful notion into one of its directives, where it says: "race is a social construct with no biological significance".
That may be the position of the EU and PC professors. Nature, it seems, has other ideas. She divides people by race every day, for good and ill; perhaps it's time the rest of us caught up. Honesty on race might even help doctors to understand some diseases a little better. http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/assets/images/darkerbullet.gif


Source (http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/5649,opinion,celts-and-cystic-fibrosis)

[YggsVinr]

How interesting, I'd never heard this before. Unfortunately cystic fibrosis runs in my family and my cousin, with whom I am quite close, has it. It also seems to be quite prevalent in our community (Scottish and French Canadian) as well and there are tons of stories of numerous children in a single family dying from it back in the day. My mother used to tell this story of a family who lost five children to the disease before hitting the age of five. I never really thought about how prevalent it seems to be in our region compared to other places I've been until reading this article.

[Ulf]

I was taught in college that CF was a genetic disorder of Europeans which allowed them to survive harsher/colder climates. If you were dominant/recessive you had more mucous, but not to the extent of debilitation, which prevented many infections. If you were dominant/dominant you had CF or if you were recessive/recessive you were more susceptible to infections.


The ΔF508 mutation is estimated to be up to 52,000 years old. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced as to why such a lethal mutation has persisted and spread in the human population. Other common autosomal recessive diseases such as sickle-cell anemia have been found to protect carriers from other diseases, a concept known as heterozygote advantage. Resistance to the following have all been proposed as possible sources of heterozygote advantage:

* Cholera: With the discovery that cholera toxin requires normal host CFTR proteins to function properly, it was hypothesized that carriers of mutant CFTR genes benefited from resistance to cholera and other causes of diarrhea. Further studies have not confirmed this hypothesis.
* Typhoid: Normal CFTR proteins are also essential for the entry of Salmonella typhi into cells, suggesting that carriers of mutant CFTR genes might be resistant to typhoid fever. No in vivo study has yet confirmed this. In both cases, the low level of cystic fibrosis outside of Europe, in places where both cholera and typhoid fever are endemic, is not immediately explicable.
* Diarrhoea: It has also been hypothesized that the prevalence of CF in Europe might be connected with the development of cattle domestication. In this hypothesis, carriers of a single mutant CFTR chromosome had some protection from diarrhoea caused by lactose intolerance, prior to the appearance of the mutations that created lactose tolerance.
* Tuberculosis: Poolman and Galvani from Yale University have added another possible explanation - that carriers of the gene have some resistance to TB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cystic_fibrosis#Theories_about_the_prevalence_of_C F

This may have been the opinion of my professor but she seemed pretty keen on noting the differences between races. Also explaining that sickle-cell dominant/recessive Africans were less susceptible to death from malaria.


Sickle-cell disease occurs more commonly in people (or their descendants) from parts of tropical and sub-tropical regions where malaria is or was common. One-third of all aboriginal inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa carry the gene. This is because those with only one of the two alleles of the sickle-cell disease are resistant to malaria, since an infestation of the malaria plasmodium is halted by the sickling of the cells which it infests. In areas where malaria is common, there is a survival value in carrying a single sickle-cell gene, AS heterozygotes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease

:shrug:

[Grumpy Cat]

Yes, and with this discovery one university in Canada, Carleton University, tried to stop its Shinerama campaign because CF affects mainly whites. This case caused national outrage.

When the student council suddenly found themselves the most hated people in Canada, the president was denying her involvement saying the motion was not written by her and that these things are not edited, and the person who actually wrote the motion, Donnie Northrup, compared continuing the Shinerama campaign to continuing slavery.

[YggsVinr]

Yes, and with this discovery one university in Canada, Carleton University, tried to stop its Shinerama campaign because CF affects mainly whites. This case caused national outrage.

When the student council suddenly found themselves the most hated people in Canada, the president was denying her involvement saying the motion was not written by her and that these things are not edited, and the person who actually wrote the motion, Donnie Northrup, compared continuing the Shinerama campaign to continuing slavery.

I remember this. Absolutely ridiculous and shows the sheer stupidity of some people, and really confirms my belief that a great number of people accepted into universities today aren't exactly of the caliber to be participating in academia.

For those interested in reading about this:
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/11/25/carleton-shelves-shinerama-on-faulty-facts/

[SouthernBoy]

My cousin has cystic fibrosis. :(

[Grumpy Cat]

I remember this. Absolutely ridiculous and shows the sheer stupidity of some people, and really confirms my belief that a great number of people accepted into universities today aren't exactly of the caliber to be participating in academia.

For those interested in reading about this:
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2008/11/25/carleton-shelves-shinerama-on-faulty-facts/

I agree. Not only are they misinformed (CF affects all races) but playing racial politics with a charity is just disgusting. Was highly inappropriate. These are peoples' lives, no place for politics.

[Arundel]

Do any of you have any information concerning multiple sclerosis? I have read enough articles to know how it works, but why does it suddenly appear in a family.
I had a younger brother who was very healthy & athletic. He was blond & blue eyed & looked germanic. I was always rather thin and frail. About the time he started to high school he started limping, and it slowly grew worse. He was able to graduate, but it was all down hill from there. He went from a walker to a wheel chair, and finally became bedfast. He finally just wasted away and died of pneumonia when he was 46, 30 years of despair & pain. He was always mentally alert to the end.
I have studied my family ancestors for 11 generations, & there has never been anyone afflicted with anything similar to multiple sclerosis. It just came out of nowhere, and was so surprising considering what a healthy, strong, little boy he was. Everything I have read states that it is not inheritable, and no one in the related families have been affected in modern times.
I have thought many times, it could have been me.
Arundel

[Mikula]

A high frequency of mutation of the G551D gene CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator), causing cystic fibrosis is found in the Czech Republic, Austria, and among the Celtic nations: Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Ireland and Brittany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechs#Genetics)

It makes sense: Central Europe is a craddle of Celtic people.
For example major part of Czech Republic is called Bohemia, and its name orinated from Celtic tribes Boii living there, before.
Also some names of rivers, mountains etc. are of Celtic origin, here.

[Helloandgoodbye]

Here it says that cystic fibrosis spread throughout Europe with Neolithic farmers. Is it possible?

"Cystic fribrosis is believed to have spread throughout Europe with the migration of Neolithic farmers. [...] The highest known estimates for the frequencies of CF today are in England and France. From these two locations CF frequencies decline in all geographic directions in Europe." - Anthropologica. Volume XXXIX, Number 1-2, 1997. p. 150 (https://books.google.com/books?id=0YK62TvAtZoC&pg=PA150).

http://www.europeanlung.org/assets/components/phpthumbof/cache/cysticfibrosis.274ee2a2099b5f55d7ddd738a4779a7b.jp g
Estimated prevalence of cystic fibrosis from 2007 to 2009 (europeanlung.org)