Mick Hartley

The Times report the views of Phil Woolas:

A government minister has warned that inbreeding among immigrants is causing a surge in birth defects – comments likely to spark a new row over the place of Muslims in British society.

Phil Woolas, an environment minister, said the culture of arranged marriages between first cousins was the “elephant in the room”. Woolas, a former race relations minister, said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.”

The minister, whose views were supported by medical experts this weekend, said: “The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children].”

Woolas emphasised the practice did not extend to all Muslim communities but was confined mainly to families originating from rural Pakistan. However, up to half of all marriages within these communities are estimated to involve first cousins.

Medical research suggests that while British Pakistanis are responsible for 3% of all births, they account for one in three British children born with genetic illnesses.

There’s a hint in the way the Times report this that Woolas is taking advantage of the Archbishop furore to drop some more unpleasantness onto British Muslims – or maybe that’s just the Times’ reason for giving his views front page prominence – so it’s a shame that they haven’t quoted any of the medical experts they mention. And it’s a shame that Woolas doesn’t take more care with his language before coming out with this kind of stuff, especially on a delicate subject like this. “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem”, he says. Nope – there’s an increased likelihood, but (see below) it’s still less than about a one in eight chance.

I posted about this before, when a 2005 report, commissioned by MP Ann Cryer, “revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide”:

It is estimated that more than 55 per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, resulting in an increasing rate of genetic defects and high rates of infant mortality. The likelihood of unrelated couples having the same variant genes that cause recessive disorders are estimated to be 100-1. Between first cousins, the odds increase to as much as one in eight.

In Bradford, more than three quarters of all Pakistani marriages are believed to be between first cousins. The city’s Royal Infirmary Hospital has identified more than 140 different recessive disorders among local children, compared with the usual 20-30.

Back then BBC Newsnight did manage to quote an expert:

Dr Peter Corry, Consultant Paediatrician at Bradford Royal Infirmary, says his hospital sees so many recessive genetic illnesses that it has become a centre of excellence for the treatment of some of them.

Dr Corry tells the programme they have identified about 140 different autosomal recessive disorders among local children. He estimates that a typical district would see 20 to 30.

Birmingham Primary Care Trust estimates that one in ten of all children born to first cousin marriages in Birmingham’s large Pakistani community either dies in infancy or goes on to suffer serious disability as a result of recessive genetic disorders.

Recessive genetic illness is one of the main reasons for admission to the city’s children’s hospital.

But, because cousin marriage has such a long history, raising these risks is sometimes interpreted as a challenge to the community’s culture.

It’s an important issue, but the timing (and the phrasing) could certainly be better.