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Every few years, in fact, a new study like Albain's materializes, each following a remarkably similar logic: Researchers identify a disparity in health outcomes (cancer survival or response to treatment, for example) that falls along racial fault lines; investigators then adjust for socioeconomic status, and, when the disparity persists, conclude it must be genetic. That consistent failure of reasoning bemuses Jay Kaufman, a McGill University professor of epidemiology who studies health disparities. "Why are we still doing this study?" he says. "If you are trying to make the argument that [different health outcomes] must be genetic by exhausting other...
...question is, Why the difference in HPV infections? It could have to do with the fact that young white men practice oral sex more often and earlier - a common way young people acquire HPV - than black men, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So, with this particular cancer, the survival gap may well be attributed to sociocultural differences in sexual habits, says Brawley, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. In the hands of another researcher, he says, perhaps these findings would have been chalked up to some unknown biological difference involving race...
Fundamentally researchers do not dispute the fact that biology - namely genetics - helps determine individual health outcomes. But the practice of categorizing patients by race has yet to further the discovery of significant gene mutations. What's more, say critics, it promotes racial thinking while dismissing the more germane issue of socioeconomics. Indeed, Albain and her coauthors used a single, widely disputed metric in their study - patients' zip codes linked to census tract data - to "adjust" for socioeconomic status. Yet researchers know that people living within one zip code can include the city's wealthiest and poorest residents. And even...
Still, there was little surprise about the Rafah confrontation for longtime observers of Palestinian politics. Hamas, in fact, has always been at odds with al-Qaeda. Despite its Islamist ideology, Hamas is first and foremost a nationalist movement, taking its cue from Palestinian public opinion and framing its goals and strategies on the basis of national objectives, rather than the "global" jihadist ideology of al-Qaeda. For example, Hamas has periodically debated the question of whether to attack American targets in its midst, and each time has reiterated the insistence of the movement's founders that it confine its resistance...
...inspiring as these accounts of voting may be, the fact is Afghans did so in lesser numbers than the last presidential elections. And that is an ominous change, emblematic of the deepening insecurity that plagues much of the country. The climate of fear was measurable in degrees depending on what part of Afghanistan you were in: higher across the Taliban's southern stronghold, where threats of violence in cities like Kandahar were punctuated by sporadic attacks; and less so toward the center and north, the base of President Karzai's top challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister. (Watch...