Right wing newspaper The Telegraph supporting right-wing MPs campaign to ban cousin marriage by cherry picking health service docs that aren't there to promote but giving guidance to health professionals on how to treat patients and have zero impact on whether people choose to marry their cousin or not.

The prevalence is higher in UK Pakistani communities like Bradford. Having a right wing politician cherry pick info they dislike about minorities to start a crusade against minorities is as old as time.

I didn't think reactionary right wing politics would get so much traction on Lemmy of all places. Critically assess your sources, who is publishing, who is saying, and why.

Next week. Right wing MP pushes to ban the burka as it has x% impact on pedestrian safety at road crossings. When racists cannot directly discriminate, they don't stop, they just go for indirect strategies.

What is the rate among the control group?

Roll tide!

An unfortunate aspect of Pakistani culture that has carried over to the UK.

Families would marry within the family to keep their wealth within the family.

Unfortunately after successive generations, this can cause serious problems.

This is maybe an unpopular opinion but I remain on team “stay the fuck out of other people’s business.” This fits soundly in the “other people’s business” category.

This is what happens when people are afraid to criticize...

I don't think marriage is the problem. It's having children

You need to parse the sentence a bit. "85 to 90% of cousin couples do not have affected children" does not mean that the odds of one child being born with a hereditary genetic defect is 15%. It means that, for the average family size of a first-cousin couple, the odds are 10-15% that at least one of the kids is affected.

So, let's conservatively say the average family size among those who marry first cousins is 3. The odds of at least one in those three kids having a genetic defect are stated to be 15%. So that means the odds of any individual kid whose parents are first cousins having a genetic defect are a bit under 5% (the odds of a given event happening at least once in three independent trials).

The odds will be substantially lower if that 15% figure were based on a larger family size than 3.

As a baseline, tn the UK, the odds in the overall UK population of a genetic defect occurring are around 2.55%.

So the risk is roughly double the baseline for any individual child. But the way the numbers are presented makes it seem misleadingly high and has led to predictable screeching from the usual quarters. There is also no measure of severity. For example, despite my parents being unrelated, I have a genetic defect that causes high cholesterol levels in my blood. However, it's cheaply treatable (woo hoo, statins!) so its impact on pubilc health is next to nil.

I'd favour banning marriages where the partners have first-cousin and closer degrees of consanguinity, but I also see the point of not catastrophising the actual impact.

I think this might be relevant

Devils advocate: I have a genetic defect that has 50% chance of being passed to my children. It causes bone tumors that range from stetic to life changing.

We only managed to ensure it wasn't with expensive DNA tests pre - implantation.

Should I be barred from marriage if I can't pay for that?

It's not a hypothetical

Cousin marriage is a heavily exaggerated statistic. Unless it happens many generations in a row the genetic variation does not nearly reach anything representing sibling marriage.

They have to justify the inbreeding of the monarchy somehow.

I think incest is icky and we should "aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population"

/s

I think these sorts of conversations are too nuanced for any politician to have, like the death penalty. They'd just use it to target people the right doesn't like.

Only?

Les cousins dangereux

Am I the only one that thinks 15% is way too high of a chance to be rolling the dice like that? I've played enough XCOM to know that even a 99% success rate will still bite you in the ass.

Of those 15% I bet 100% vote for Deform UK.

I wonder where this 15% figure comes from. All the research I can find estimates the probability for these disorders at around 2-4% for first degree cousins. This is about the same as becoming a mother at 40 with a non-related man.

The article only talks about some NHS training documents and is very opinionated in style. Smells like a snappy headline about a controversial topic was more important than proper research.