7 ms·

In Amish village, a rural doctor sees the rarest diseases on Earth

runeb 7y ago
Link that works in Europe https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/special-reports/2019/10/10/amish-mennonite-health-wisconsin-doctor-has-found-rare-genetic-diseases-founder-effect/2119965001/ https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/special-reports/2019/10/1...
- smallbigfish 7y ago
  GDPR brought too much hate and it solved too little.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
I remember seeing a documentary--too lazy to look it up now--but it was about the Inuit (or a portion of them) that let a guest sleep with the woman /women in their igloo. At first look, this goes against Darwin, who wants to raise someone else's "bastard" but without it they'd be doomed. So the lesser of evils.
- red75prime 7y ago
  I've heard that too. And it seems that something like that took place [0]. Not "a guest", but "close friend" though. [0]: "American Anthropology, 1888-1920: Papers from the American Anthropologist" ISBN 0803280084 page 479
  - idoubtit 7y ago
    I've first heard of this custom while reading Marco polo's "Le livre des merveilles du monde" (The Travels of Marco Polo). IIRC the editor's notes, the custom did exist in some places of the Himalaya mountains. > The guest may stay and enjoy the wife's society as long as he lists, whilst the husband has no shame in the matter, but indeed considers it an honour. And all the men of this province are made wittols of by their wives in this way. Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Book_1/Chapter_41 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Boo...
    - hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
      Western culture says it’s monogamous due to moral and law, but something between 1/4 to 1/2 of the men and up to 1/3 of the women “cheat”. So in terms of genetic diversity it’s the same, we just pretend it doesn’t happen while other cultures don’t see an issue.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        There are huge differences in extra pair paternity across cultures and social class. People are not the same everywhere. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31305-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)... A Historical-Genetic Reconstruction of Human Extra-Pair Paternity Specifically, we observe that estimated EPP rates among married couples varied by more than an order of magnitude, from 0.4% to 5.9%, and peaked among families with a low socioeconomic background living in densely populated cities of the late 19th century. Our results support theoretical predictions that social context can strongly affect the outcomes of sexual conflict in human populations by modulating the incentives and opportunities for engaging in extra-pair relationships.
- Iv 7y ago
  Evolution focuses on populations, not individuals. A lot of things make more sense if you consider that.
  - marton78 7y ago
    On the contrary. Evolution focuses on individuals.
    - iguy 7y ago
      Or lower, on selfish genes™️. Which can certainly imply doing things bad for the individual but good for their kin group. Although I don't know about this Inuit story.
      - hprotagonist 7y ago
        “selfish gene” is my very least favorite anthropomorphism.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Darwin himself argued for group selection. He postulated that moral men might not do any better than immoral men but that tribes of moral men would certainly “have an immense advantage” over fractious bands of pirates." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-the-group/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-th... Though the pendulum swings. The case isn't clear-cut, and the argument for group-level selection (or even symbiotic or more general multi-species co-evolution) is strong.
      - im3w1l 7y ago
        Group level selection is irrefutably a thing (Multicellular organisms are selected as a group. Eusocial insects are too). The only question is how important it is in various contexts, in some it may be negligible.
        7y ago
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  Similarly such stories circulate about the Hutterites in Canada. I hear you’d better be white looking though
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  Monkeys and other animals that have strong social structures will do this for similar reasons.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Well it also depends on perceptions of relationships and monogamy. I don't know of their cultural ideal attitudes towards wives and agency (say she decides who she sleeps with period vs property to be shared spectrum) or actual for that matter but if it is a reciprocal norm it is likely a wash quantitatively. Not to mention survival concerns about having children to care for them in old age. It reminds me of one joke about ancient Norsemen not caring about blatant signs of infidelity like the children having different skin and hair color so long as their sons were strong.
cstross 7y ago
... Or the doctor in question could just have moved to Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire. (n the mid-1980s I made an early career mistake and qualified as a pharmacist. I did my pre-registration work at the -- now closed -- district hospital in Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town of roughly 60,000 people. Dewsbury is in a steep valley and the working-class population tended not to travel: according to an older relative who worked there all his life, he knew co-workers who had been born, worked, lived, and retired in Dewsbury without ever travelling more than ten miles away from their birthplace. (Automobiles didn't really become a mass-cultural phenomenon there until the 1950s-1960s.) Cue lots of first-cousin marriages. During the 1970s, a Pakistani immigrant community arrived ... also from an isolated mountain valley town that didn't have much time for exogamy. The hospital serving a city of 60,000 people shouldn't have a 30-bed cystic fibrosis ward (CF is an inborn error of metabolism) ... but Dewsbury needed one. (CF has a frequency of roughly 1 in 3000 in Northern Europe, so you'd expect 20 living cases in a town the size of Dewsbury: but they wouldn't need hospital beds simultaneously! The local frequency was much higher.) Nor should it have exotic conditions like familial hypobetalipoproteinaemia showing up in the population. Again, Dewsbury had that. In fact, Dewsbury was so notorious for genetic disorders that house officers and registrars training in the relevant fields got rotated there from the big teaching hospitals in Leeds (the nearest big city). Upshot: if you get geographically isolated communities with religious cultures that discourage exogamy, you get really weird genetic disorders cropping up within surprisingly few generations.
- growlist 7y ago
  Also in Surrey. A relative worked with visually impaired children, one of them of Pakistani heritage and having albinism, and this kid said one day "it's because we marry our cousins". This is one of those situations where the authorities etc. being all cringey and PC about things harms the very people they are trying to protect.
  - cstross 7y ago
    It's not specific to Pakistan: the same problem tends to be seen in many if not all cultures with a strong dowry tradition. If substantial wealth is transferred with a bride, there's a powerful incentive to marry within the family. (This used to happen in Europe, but during the middle ages the church banned cousin marriages for political reasons: it stopped the nobility consolidating too much power.)
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
The link just redirects to eu.usatoday.com's homepage for me :(
- adventured 7y ago
  This may work: https://outline.com/4wdE3t https://outline.com/4wdE3t
beardedwizard 7y ago
This was a good story. I enjoyed the rural vibe and the simple mechanics: do it because you care, it's right, and it will still be hard.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
Similar thing going on with the Navajo and xeroderma pigmentosum: http://archive.pov.org/blog/pressroom/2012/06/sun-kissed-premieres-on-pov/ http://archive.pov.org/blog/pressroom/2012/06/sun-kissed-pre... Attributed to gene-pool shrinkage and/or ancestry mix-ups arising from the "trail of tears."
- protomyth 7y ago
  Don't you mean the Long Walk?
  - jstewartmobile 7y ago
    Why y'all downvoting this man? He's right.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      The full reference is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo The Trail of Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears was other tribes such as the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations. It still amazes me that my most down-voted posts are about Native American facts.
      - gamegoblin 7y ago
        I assume most downvoters (not having heard of the Navajo event) thought you were making an inappropriate joke referencing the Stephen King novel of the same name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk
        Nasrudith 7y ago
        Also out of context it sort of sounds like a denial of the suffering and conditions - even if that is the name thet used. In my experience there was no denial about the travesties but the Trail of Tears and maybe the Black Hills got name checked as events perhaps because of the precedent and disregard for even the Constitution and the Supreme Court in the first and the egregious "kick them off of their own reserved lands for a short term gold rush".
collsni 7y ago
This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood. He actually birthed me in Viroqua Wisconsin where he spends a few days a week. In the past few years (since they got a new Clinic in La Farge) his time has been pretty exclusive to La Farge and the Amish community. However he still sees my father multiple times a year, who is not Amish.
NorthOf33rd 7y ago
Colorado City, AZ Is Another great example. It seems if you want to See some weird stuff, closed off religious communities are the place to be. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170726-the-polygamous-town-facing-genetic-disaster https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170726-the-polygamous-t...
neonate 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20191130183259/https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/11/29/wisconsin-rural-doctor-treats-amish-studies-rare-genetic-diseases/3995625002/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191130183259/https://www.usato...

Link that works in Europe https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/special-reports/2019/10/10/amish-mennonite-health-wisconsin-doctor-has-found-rare-genetic-diseases-founder-effect/2119965001/ https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/special-reports/2019/10/1...

smallbigfish 7y ago
GDPR brought too much hate and it solved too little.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

I remember seeing a documentary--too lazy to look it up now--but it was about the Inuit (or a portion of them) that let a guest sleep with the woman /women in their igloo. At first look, this goes against Darwin, who wants to raise someone else's "bastard" but without it they'd be doomed. So the lesser of evils.

red75prime 7y ago
I've heard that too. And it seems that something like that took place [0]. Not "a guest", but "close friend" though. [0]: "American Anthropology, 1888-1920: Papers from the American Anthropologist" ISBN 0803280084 page 479
- idoubtit 7y ago
  I've first heard of this custom while reading Marco polo's "Le livre des merveilles du monde" (The Travels of Marco Polo). IIRC the editor's notes, the custom did exist in some places of the Himalaya mountains. > The guest may stay and enjoy the wife's society as long as he lists, whilst the husband has no shame in the matter, but indeed considers it an honour. And all the men of this province are made wittols of by their wives in this way. Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Book_1/Chapter_41 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Boo...
  - hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
    Western culture says it’s monogamous due to moral and law, but something between 1/4 to 1/2 of the men and up to 1/3 of the women “cheat”. So in terms of genetic diversity it’s the same, we just pretend it doesn’t happen while other cultures don’t see an issue.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      There are huge differences in extra pair paternity across cultures and social class. People are not the same everywhere. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31305-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)... A Historical-Genetic Reconstruction of Human Extra-Pair Paternity Specifically, we observe that estimated EPP rates among married couples varied by more than an order of magnitude, from 0.4% to 5.9%, and peaked among families with a low socioeconomic background living in densely populated cities of the late 19th century. Our results support theoretical predictions that social context can strongly affect the outcomes of sexual conflict in human populations by modulating the incentives and opportunities for engaging in extra-pair relationships.
Iv 7y ago
Evolution focuses on populations, not individuals. A lot of things make more sense if you consider that.
- marton78 7y ago
  On the contrary. Evolution focuses on individuals.
  - iguy 7y ago
    Or lower, on selfish genes™️. Which can certainly imply doing things bad for the individual but good for their kin group. Although I don't know about this Inuit story.
    - hprotagonist 7y ago
      “selfish gene” is my very least favorite anthropomorphism.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Darwin himself argued for group selection. He postulated that moral men might not do any better than immoral men but that tribes of moral men would certainly “have an immense advantage” over fractious bands of pirates." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-the-group/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-th... Though the pendulum swings. The case isn't clear-cut, and the argument for group-level selection (or even symbiotic or more general multi-species co-evolution) is strong.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      Group level selection is irrefutably a thing (Multicellular organisms are selected as a group. Eusocial insects are too). The only question is how important it is in various contexts, in some it may be negligible.
      - 7y ago
selimthegrim 7y ago
Similarly such stories circulate about the Hutterites in Canada. I hear you’d better be white looking though
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
Monkeys and other animals that have strong social structures will do this for similar reasons.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Well it also depends on perceptions of relationships and monogamy. I don't know of their cultural ideal attitudes towards wives and agency (say she decides who she sleeps with period vs property to be shared spectrum) or actual for that matter but if it is a reciprocal norm it is likely a wash quantitatively. Not to mention survival concerns about having children to care for them in old age. It reminds me of one joke about ancient Norsemen not caring about blatant signs of infidelity like the children having different skin and hair color so long as their sons were strong.

cstross 7y ago

... Or the doctor in question could just have moved to Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire. (n the mid-1980s I made an early career mistake and qualified as a pharmacist. I did my pre-registration work at the -- now closed -- district hospital in Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town of roughly 60,000 people. Dewsbury is in a steep valley and the working-class population tended not to travel: according to an older relative who worked there all his life, he knew co-workers who had been born, worked, lived, and retired in Dewsbury without ever travelling more than ten miles away from their birthplace. (Automobiles didn't really become a mass-cultural phenomenon there until the 1950s-1960s.) Cue lots of first-cousin marriages. During the 1970s, a Pakistani immigrant community arrived ... also from an isolated mountain valley town that didn't have much time for exogamy. The hospital serving a city of 60,000 people shouldn't have a 30-bed cystic fibrosis ward (CF is an inborn error of metabolism) ... but Dewsbury needed one. (CF has a frequency of roughly 1 in 3000 in Northern Europe, so you'd expect 20 living cases in a town the size of Dewsbury: but they wouldn't need hospital beds simultaneously! The local frequency was much higher.) Nor should it have exotic conditions like familial hypobetalipoproteinaemia showing up in the population. Again, Dewsbury had that. In fact, Dewsbury was so notorious for genetic disorders that house officers and registrars training in the relevant fields got rotated there from the big teaching hospitals in Leeds (the nearest big city). Upshot: if you get geographically isolated communities with religious cultures that discourage exogamy, you get really weird genetic disorders cropping up within surprisingly few generations.

growlist 7y ago
Also in Surrey. A relative worked with visually impaired children, one of them of Pakistani heritage and having albinism, and this kid said one day "it's because we marry our cousins". This is one of those situations where the authorities etc. being all cringey and PC about things harms the very people they are trying to protect.
- cstross 7y ago
  It's not specific to Pakistan: the same problem tends to be seen in many if not all cultures with a strong dowry tradition. If substantial wealth is transferred with a bride, there's a powerful incentive to marry within the family. (This used to happen in Europe, but during the middle ages the church banned cousin marriages for political reasons: it stopped the nobility consolidating too much power.)

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

The link just redirects to eu.usatoday.com's homepage for me :(

adventured 7y ago
This may work: https://outline.com/4wdE3t https://outline.com/4wdE3t

beardedwizard 7y ago

This was a good story. I enjoyed the rural vibe and the simple mechanics: do it because you care, it's right, and it will still be hard.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

Similar thing going on with the Navajo and xeroderma pigmentosum: http://archive.pov.org/blog/pressroom/2012/06/sun-kissed-premieres-on-pov/ http://archive.pov.org/blog/pressroom/2012/06/sun-kissed-pre... Attributed to gene-pool shrinkage and/or ancestry mix-ups arising from the "trail of tears."

protomyth 7y ago
Don't you mean the Long Walk?
- jstewartmobile 7y ago
  Why y'all downvoting this man? He's right.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    The full reference is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo The Trail of Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears was other tribes such as the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations. It still amazes me that my most down-voted posts are about Native American facts.
    - gamegoblin 7y ago
      I assume most downvoters (not having heard of the Navajo event) thought you were making an inappropriate joke referencing the Stephen King novel of the same name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk
      - Nasrudith 7y ago
        Also out of context it sort of sounds like a denial of the suffering and conditions - even if that is the name thet used. In my experience there was no denial about the travesties but the Trail of Tears and maybe the Black Hills got name checked as events perhaps because of the precedent and disregard for even the Constitution and the Supreme Court in the first and the egregious "kick them off of their own reserved lands for a short term gold rush".

collsni 7y ago

This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood. He actually birthed me in Viroqua Wisconsin where he spends a few days a week. In the past few years (since they got a new Clinic in La Farge) his time has been pretty exclusive to La Farge and the Amish community. However he still sees my father multiple times a year, who is not Amish.

NorthOf33rd 7y ago

Colorado City, AZ Is Another great example. It seems if you want to See some weird stuff, closed off religious communities are the place to be. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170726-the-polygamous-town-facing-genetic-disaster https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170726-the-polygamous-t...

neonate 7y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20191130183259/https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/11/29/wisconsin-rural-doctor-treats-amish-studies-rare-genetic-diseases/3995625002/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191130183259/https://www.usato...