Posted on 06/24/2004 3:25:47 PM PDT by blam
Week of June 19, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 25 , p. 397
Hepatitis C drugs are less effective in black patients
Nathan Seppa
Standard drugs for hepatitis C virus are less likely to knock out the infection in black patients than in whites, finds a study in the May 27 New England Journal of Medicine.
Hepatitis C is a liver ailment that afflicts roughly 4 million people in the United States. It often goes unnoticed until it causes cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer.
Researchers gave two antiviral drugs, peginterferon alpha-2b and ribavirin, for 11 months, to 81 black patients and 79 white, non-Hispanic patients with hepatitis C. At the end of the treatment, nearly 75 percent of the white patients no longer had hepatitis C virus detectable in their blood, whereas only 25 percent of the black patients showed no virus.
The drug combination is the best therapy available against the disease, says study coauthor Andrew Muir, a gastroenterologist at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. More than 90 percent of patients in whom the hepatitis C virus is undetectable after treatment are still free of the virus 10 years later, he says.
Muir and his colleagues speculate that black patients might harbor characteristics in their immune systems that boost harmful inflammation in response to hepatitis C infections and thus hamper the body's response to the virus.
Ping.
Damn racist drugs.
It's all the fault of "The Man", i.e. George Bush
This is wrong. We are all alike. Ban this drug immediately.
This is one example of why race relations is so vital to the human species. We exist as separate races due to geological boundaries. These "races" are actually evidence of genetic limitation. We need to re-homogenize the human genetic pool so that these limitations disappear. Plus, everyone will be a lovely shade of caramel. That's just way sexier than pale white. CARAMEL POWER also sounds tastier than "White Power" when chanted. There are many genetically inherited diseases which wouldn't be so prevalent if our genetics were re-distributed. I am all for the "mongrelization" of the species. With jet travel it's unavoidable. I have had purebred dogs and mutts. The mutts were stronger, healthier, and smarter.
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