Gee, I wonder if the African American study
subjects were given interferon-alpha along
with the purported anti-viral HAART{*filter*}tails?
(HAART {*filter*} suppress the cytotoxic T lymphocytes
(CD8+ CTLs) in the liver tissue, causing a
huge HepC viral burst, liver damage, symptomatic
disease and death). That would certainly explain
these incredibly disparate claims...

Hmmm, I wonder what the doctors have in store for
Africa

I wonder what the doctors have in store for
African Americans with HepC?

fred

=========

For African Americans, Interferon Much Less Effective
Against Hepatitis C -- Hispanics, Asians, Caucasians
Respond Far Better

Promising New Liver Cancer Screening Program for Native Alaskans Could
Be Effective in Developing Countries

CHICAGO, November 10 - At the American Association for the Study of
Liver Diseases 1998 Annual Meeting in Chicago, November 6 - 10,
researchers discussed disturbing new findings indicating that
interferon, the most commonly used drug against chronic Hepatitis C, is
much less effective for African Americans than it is for other racial
and ethnic groups.

Jay Hoofnagle, MD, of the National Institutes of Health, discussed a
study of the role race and ethnicity play in determining how well
patients respond to using interferon to treat chronic Hepatitis C. A
large, randomized, North American controlled trial of response to
interferon compared African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, and Asian
patients who were similar in age and in their levels of Hepatitis C
virus (HCV) as measured by an antibody called HCV RNA.

At the end of the interferon therapy, only 5% of African-Americans
became HCV RNA negative, as opposed to 33% of Causasians, 28% of
Hispanics, and 40% of Asians. "The differences in response to interferon
in HCV is as yet unexplained," according to the abstract of the research
findings presented at the AASLD meeting, "but have major implications
for future directions in the therapy of the disease.

For another ethnic minority, Native Alaskans, the AASLD Annual Meeting
had some positive news. Brian J.McMahon, MD, of the Alaska Native
Medical Center in Anchorage, AK, reported on a screening program that is
helping to detect liver cancer and improve survival rates. In late 1982,
the Alaska Native Medical Center launched a state-wide program to
conduct regular {*filter*} tests of all Alaska Natives who have chronic
Hepatitis B. Persons with chronic Hepatitis B are at a high risk of
developing liver cancer during their lifetimes. The tests evaluated the
level of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in {*filter*}, which is an indicator of
liver cancer. Those with elevated AFP were checked for tumors with
ultrasound and treated when necessary. The five and ten year survival
rate for those found to have Hepatitis C, were 45% and 24% respectively
compared to 0% for patients diagnosed with liver cancer prior to the
screening program. The program is effective in part because the AFP
tests are easy to perform, and the program is relatively cheap to
administer and coordinate, a requirement for dealing with the Alaska
Native population, which lives in widely dispersed, isolated locations.
"In Third World countries and perhaps China, where large numbers of
people have been infected with Hepatitis B very early in life, this kind
of program could be very effective," says McMahon.

###

Dood, African American may be a nice politically correct, or even preferred,
term, but it is grossly inaccurate in describing physiological differences
between races.  ACE inhibitors are less effective in Black people than White
people...  They do not differentiate between African Americans and
Jamaicans.   Ditto for interferon.  The only times you can generalise
African Americans is in terms disease risks.  African Americans are at a
MUCH higher risk for colon cancer than African Africans.

Pay mind to your use of PC terms.

The term "African American" was in the title and
body of the article I posted -- I didn't write
the article titled "For African Americans,
Interferon Much Less Effective Against Hepatitis C
-- Hispanics, Asians, Caucasians Respond Far Better"

It has more to do with the economics of marketing
these orphan {*filter*} to social classes who receive
them for free -- thanks to the generosity of
the right-wing, conservative Congress that
silently approves and appropriates more money for
the cause of their big business pharmaceutical golf
partners ... not to mention their bleeding hearts
for blacks, {*filter*}s and IV drug users.

...

I stick with the term most Blacks use for themselves.

I agree with you, Daddio - it don't make too much sense.  And IMO a lot of it
is a power game of getting people to change their behavior (speech) at the
behest of certain political groups.  I can understand and sympathize with why
the euphamistic "Colored" was debunked for "Black".  But the changes since then
have not been improvements, and have been factually wrong (almost all "African
Americans" are really "African-European-Americans" and I am *not* colorless as
"Person of Color" implies.)

-------

"It is difficult to distinguish where the feminine ends and nature begins."
 - Antonio Carlos Jobim

   No, no, no.  It went Negro to colored to Afro-American to black
(sometimes Black with a B, as though Black was a country), to
African-American. The last by analogy to Italian-American, etc.  Person
of color is used as an incusive for anybody non-caucasian, as a way of
suggesting solidarity.  Big arguments about whether or not Asians
(never call them Orientals) are persons of color.

   African-American does make the most sense as a term, IMHO.  However,
if you're an imigrant to the U.S. from South African, it is manifestly
verbotten to refer to yourself as African-American on a minority
business grant application, or minority scholarship application.
They'll take one look at you at some point and get this fraud-detecting
look on their faces and say: "You're not African-American!"  To which
you say: "Oh, I see.  You really mean *Black*...."

-------

"It is difficult to distinguish where the feminine ends and nature begins."
 - Antonio Carlos Jobim

-----------------------------------------------
Do you earn money in some fashion that doesn't demand your asking if the people facing you want fries?
                                Pastorio on mics.writing

Can computers cope with human races?

Copyright 1989 by the Association for Computing Machinery
[This article appeared in Communications of the ACM, February 1989.
Copying without fee is permitted provided that the copies are not made
or distributed for direct commercial advantage and credit to the
source is given.  Abstracting with credit is permitted.]

In trying to apply a computer to a task that humans do, we often
discover that it doesn't work. One common problem is that humans are
able to deal with fuzzy concepts but computers are not -- they need
precise representations and it is hard to represent a fuzzy concept in
a precise way. However, if we look closer at such tasks, we often
discover that the weakness actually lies not in the computer but in
ourselves -- we didn't understand what we were doing in the first
place.

When faced with a problem of this sort, some people refuse to
recognize the conceptual failure. Instead of seeking a better
representation for the task, they thrash away at making the fuzzy
scheme work, insisting that there is nothing wrong with the conceptual
base.

I will illustrate one such problem with a true story.
The central theme is the fuzzy concept of racial and ethnic classification,
as used by the U.S. government and a horde of other bureaucracies.
These organizations have been carrying out elaborate statistical
computations and making major policy decisions based on this concept
for many years and are still doing it, with problematical results.

I begin with my first major encounter with this scheme, some 25 years
ago.

                    White faces in new places

In 1963, after living in Lexington, Massachusetts for 7 years, my
family and I moved to the Washington D.C. area where I helped set up a
new office for Mitre Corporation. After three days of searching, we
bought a house then under construction in a pleasant new suburb called
Mantua Hills, near Fairfax, {*filter*}ia. I hadn't noticed it during our
search, but it soon became evident that there were nothing but white
faces in that area. In fact, there were nothing but white faces for
miles around.

We expected to find some cultural differences and did. For example,
people drove much less aggressively than in Massachusetts. The first
time that I did a Boston-style bluff at a traffic circle, the other
cars yielded!  This took all the fun out of it and I was embarrassed
into driving more conservatively.

When I applied for a {*filter*}ia driver's license, I noticed that the
second question on the application, just after ``Name,'' was ``Race.''
When filling out forms, I have always made it a practice to omit
information that I think is irrelevant. It seemed to me that my race
had nothing to do with driving a car, so I left it blank.

When I handed the application to the clerk along with the fee, he just
looked at me, marked ``W'' in the blank field and threw it on a stack.
I guess that he had learned that this was the easiest way to deal with
outlanders.

It shortly became apparent that on all forms in {*filter*}ia, the second
question was ``Race,'' right after ``Name.'' Someone informed me that
as far as the Commonwealth of {*filter*}ia was concerned, there were just
two races: ``white'' and ``colored.'' Included in ``colored'' were all
dark-skinned people, including both kinds of Indians. I felt
uncomfortable with this system, knowing that it was part of a scheme
of legal discrimination that still pervaded the laws of many states.
For example, it was still illegal in {*filter*}ia for a ``white'' and a
``colored'' person to marry.

Our contractor was a bit slow in finishing the house. We knew that
there was mail headed our way that was probably accumulating in the
post office, so we put up the mailbox even before the house was
finished. The first day we got just two letters -- from the American
Civil Liberties Union and Martin Luther King's organization, SCLC.  We
figured that this was the postman's way of letting us know that he was
on to us. Sure enough, the next day we got the rest of our accumulated
mail, a large stack.

When our kids brought forms home from school, I started putting a
``C'' after the second question, leaving it to the authorities to
figure out whether that meant ``Colored'' or ``Caucasian.'' I doubt
that this actually confused anyone -- the entire school was lily
white.

                         Racing clearance

About this time, my boss and I and another colleague applied for a
special security clearance that we needed. There are certain
clearances that can't be named in public -- it was one of those. I had
held an ordinary Top Secret clearance for a number of years and had
held the un-namable clearance a short time before, so I did not
anticipate any problems.

When I filled out my personal history form, I noticed that question #5
was ``Race.'' In the past I had not paid attention to this question; I
just thoughtlessly wrote ``Caucasian.'' Having been sensitized by my
new environment, I re-examined it.

All of my known forebears came from Europe, mostly from Bavaria and
Bohemia, with a few from England, Ireland, and Scotland. A glance in the
mirror, however, indicated that there was Middle Eastern {*filter*} in my
veins. I have a semitic nose and skin that tans so easily that I am
often darker than many people who pass for Black. Did I inherit this
from a Hebrew, an Arab, a Gypsy or perhaps one of the Turks who
periodically pillaged Central Europe? Maybe it was from a Blackfoot
Indian that an imaginative aunt thinks was in our family tree. I will
probably never know.

As an arrogant young computer scientist, I believed that if there is
any decision that you can't figure out how to program, the question is
wrong. I couldn't figure out how to program racial classification, so
I concluded that there isn't such a thing.

I subsequently reviewed some scientific literature that confirmed this
impression. ``Race'' is, at best, a fuzzy concept about typical
physical characteristics of certain populations. At worst, of course,
it provides a basis for more contemptible conduct than any concept
other than religion.

In answer to the race question on the security form, I decided to put
``mongrel.'' It would have been slightly less provocative had I said
``human,'' but I've always enjoyed diddling forms a bit.

Shortly after I handed in the form, I received a call from a secretary
in the security office of the Defense Communications Agency. She said
that she had noticed a typographical error in the fifth question where
it said ``mongrel.'' She asked if I didn't mean ``Mongol.'' ``No
thanks,'' I said, ``I really meant `mongrel.''' She ended the
conversation rather quickly.

A few hours later I received a call from the chief security officer of
D.C.A., who I happened to know. ``Hey, Les,'' he said in a friendly
way, ``I'd like to talk to you the next time you're over here.'' I
agreed to see him later that week.

When I got there, he tried to talk me out of answering the race
question ``incorrectly.'' I asked him what he thought was the right
answer.  ``You know, Caucasian,'' he replied. ``Oh, you mean someone
from the Caucasus Mountains of the U.S.S.R.?'' I asked pointedly.
``No, you know, `white.''' ``Actually, I don't know,'' I said.

We got into a lengthy discussion in which he informed me that as far
as the Defense Department was concerned there were five races:
Caucasian, Negro, Oriental, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.  I
asked him how he would classify someone who was, by his definition,
7/8 Caucasian and 1/8 Negro. He said he wasn't sure. I asked how he
classified Egyptians and Ethiopians. He wasn't sure.

I said that I wasn't sure either and that ``mongrel'' seemed like the
best answer for me. He finally agreed to forward my form to the
security authorities but warned that I was asking for trouble.

                    A question of stability

I knew what to expect from a security background investigation:
neighbors and former acquaintances let you know it is going on by
asking ``What are they trying to get you for?'' and kidding you about
what they told the investigators. Within a week after my application
for the new clearance was submitted, it became apparent that the
investigation was already underway and that the agents were hammering
everyone they talked to about my ``mental stability.''

Gale, the personnel manager where I worked, was interviewed quite
early and came to me saying ``My God! They think you're crazy! What
did you do,{*filter*} a polo pony?'' He also remarked that they had asked
him if he knew me socially and that he had answered ``Yes, we just
celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together.'' When the investigator wanted to
know ``What is Guy Fawkes Day?'' he started to explain the gunpowder
plot but thought better of it. He settled for the explanation that
``It's a British holiday.''

An artist friend named Linda, who lived two houses away from us, told
my wife that she had no trouble answering the investigator's questions
about my stability. She said that she recalled our party the week
before when we had formed two teams to ``Walk the plank.'' In this
game, participants take turns walking the length of a 2 x 4 set on
edge and drinking a small amount of beer. Anyone who steps off is
eliminated and the team with the most total crossings after some
number of rounds wins.  Linda said that she remembered I was one of
the more stable participants.

I was glad that she had not remembered my instability at an earlier
party of hers when I broke my watch and bruised my ribs in a fall off
a skateboard. The embarrassing cause of the accident was that I had
run over the bottom of my own toga!

Meanwhile, the investigation continued full tilt everywhere I had
lived.  After about three months it stopped and a short time later I
learned that the clearance had been granted. The other two people
whose investigations were begun at the same time did not receive their
clearances until ...

read more »

-------

"It is difficult to distinguish where the feminine ends and nature begins."
 - Antonio Carlos Jobim

Jared Diamond has suggested that the determinants of techological power are
accidents of geography and local resources (see his book _Guns, Germs, and
Steel_). Whether you believe his reasoning as to the underlying causes is
up to you; it is fairly clear that a combination of higher technology (guns
and ocean-going ships), political organization, and diseases (especially
small pox and measles, which killed indigenous people, but no longer killed
their European conquerors) were responsible for spread of Europeans across
the world.

--
Mark Brandt, Ph.D.
My opinions are my own, but I tend to give them away to anyone who fails to
flee fast enough.