Kaufman on Scientists’ Complicity in Media Misrepresentations of the Relationship Between Race, Genetics, and Health Disparities
Over at the blog Epidemiology Watching, McGill epidemiologist Jay S. Kaufman draws attention to what seems like a peculiar situation concerning science reporting on the relationship between race, genetics, and health disparities. Kaufman looks at the claims made in a recent Nature Genetics article that reports on a meta-analysis of North American genome-wide association studies of over 5000 people with asthma.
The twist? Media reports on this article suggest that the researchers may have discovered a gene responsible for raising Blacks’ asthma risks and explaining racial disparities in this condition when, on its own terms, the paper does not support this conclusion.
Is this another case of reporters simply getting the science wrong? Or were the researchers themselves involved in promoting speculative conclusions in the press that they could not get away with in a peer reviewed paper? Read more from Kaufman here.