Do Black People Have a Different Type of Heart?
By Dixie Edith
Taken from www.cubadebate.cu

The story was first published on the BBC News website in mid-2005: the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a medicine for treating cardiovascular disease in black patients.

This is the first time that US authorities have given the green light to a drug targeted at a particular ethnic group. This was approved after tests confirmed a 43 percent rate of effectiveness in people of that race who were at risk of dying of heart disease, the report said.

More than a few media outlets picked up on the story, and of course other “major” news agencies such as EFE and Reuters responded over the following months.

With the approval of this drug an important step is being taken to deliver on the “promise of providing personalized medicine,” the FDA rushed to say.

A paragraph inserted—seemingly by chance—in some of the news wires warned that a number of doctors had rejected the drug, arguing—quite elementarily, don’t you think?—that there were no biological grounds to prove that a given drug works on any ethnic group and not on others.

The New York Times jumped into the fray positing that “genetics experts fear that by approving a drug targeted at a given ethnic group, the FDA may be using race as a shortcut towards genetic categorization.”

Nonetheless, several influential scientific and political groups championed the new drug, known as BiDil, in a call to make up for years of unequal medical attention. They offered it as proof that everyone is being currently taken care of in the United States.

Katrina, however, threw the Pyrrhic victory out of the window. In a disaster that has been described as the worst in US history, the poor and the black were struck hardest. It is estimated that two thirds of New Orleans’ almost a million residents were black.

To top it off, the Washington Post reported that National Census calculations showed that some 150,000 of those left homeless by the storm lived well bellow the official poverty line; with more than 50,000 of them elderly.