Black Drugs
Karama Neal, of So what can I do? fame - and one of our fav bloggers, points out that race-based pharma marketing is here, for better and worse. NitroMed's BiDil is a medicine aimed at the treatment of cardiovascular disease in African Americans. On the 16th it went before an FDA panel for approval. Karama asks, though, who is ..."African-American." Does Tiger Woods qualify? Teresa Heinz-Kerry? Barack Obama? Michael Jackson? How will physicians know how to prescribe this drug. A better approach would be to identify the (presumably) genetic factors that affect BiDil's function. It's easier to just use race instead, but it's sloppy and not good medicine.There's money at stake here.
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Re: The First Race-Based Medicine
Are Black Americans Encountering Another Tuskegee" Experiment?
I can understand how some medications can be designed for persons who have a very specific genetic background. However, black Americans are not an isolated racial group. To the contrary, black Americans are probably one of the most genetically diverse groups of people who have ever existed.
Black Americans beyond having an eclectic genetic connection to the multiple peoples who inhabit West Africa, many black Americans have both European and Native American ancestry. And let us not fail to mention about blacks immigrating from Africa and the Caribbean to the United States, who become black Americans, once they reach these shores. Are medications made for black Americans beneficial to the newest arriving black Americans?
My brother, who is a black American, suffers with idiopathic torsion dystonia, a neurological movement disorder that has its highest incidence among the European Jewry. Many of his doctors are baffled that a black man has this rare disease, until they probe for my brothers known genetic history. Our maternal great grandfather was a German Jew. Many black Americans have similar mixed ethnic identities, although we are socially and self-identified as black Americans.
We must be careful that the development of race based drugs like BiDil is not directed by misguided science. I hope that scientists are not allowing mistaken perceptions of race and pharmaceutical companies their greed to cloud the scientific process, by incorrectly manufacturing and marketing drugs based on race.
Moreover, we must ensure that the black community is not used for 21st Century medical experimentation, like blacks were used in the Tuskeegee experiment.
Benin Dakar
Duluth, GA
- by Benin Dakar on Jun 20, 2005 at 5:08 PM | link
Exactly my point! Thanks, Benin!
- by Karama on Jun 21, 2005 at 1:48 PM | link