“Breast Cancer Link to Racial Discrimination.” No doubt that
Reuters headline, and others like it, pleased
race-baiters who would have us think every problem blacks have is
due to persistent prejudice. Sadly for them, the report is
politically correct trash that any conscientious landfill would
reject.
The headline comes from a study conducted by Associate Professor Teletia
Taylor and others at the Howard University College of Medicine in
Washington, D.C. and published in the July 1 American Journal
of Epidemiology. Funding came from the National Cancer
Institute — your tax dollars at work. The researchers had black
women complete a document in 1997 that included questions on
perceived discrimination in two domains: “everyday” discrimination
(such as being treated as dishonest) and major experiences of
unfair treatment due to race (such as job, housing, and
police).
The women then reported that up to 2003 there were 593 breast
cancer cases among them. Comparing the answers to the malignancies,
the authors concluded there was “an association between racial
discrimination and increased incidence of breast cancer.”
Now here’s what they didn’t tell you.
Among women perceiving any degree of discrimination, the
researchers sliced the data 87 different ways. In 84 of these they
found no statistically significant associations.
And the three remaining data slices?
One comprised all the women surveyed, regardless of age, who
felt they’d been victims of workplace discrimination. The authors
reported they had a 20 percent increase (0.20) in relative risk of
breast tumors compared to women who didn’t feel discriminated
against. By further slicing this category to consider only women
younger than 50 they were able to boost the apparent increase in
risk to 32 percent or 0.32. Finally, by combining the categories of
perceived discrimination in jobs, housing and police, and
by slicing out those above age 50, they were able to come up with a
48 percent increased risk of 0.48.
Such tiny relative risks are generally considered meaningless,
given the inexactitude of epidemiology. Normally, said former
New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell, “We
are looking for a relative risk of three [3.0] or more” before
accepting a paper for publication. “My basic rule is if the
relative risk isn’t at least three or four, forget it,” said Robert
Temple, then director of drug evaluation at the Food and Drug
Administration. The study’s own sponsor, the National Cancer
Institute, has said “relative risks of less than two are considered
small and are usually difficult to interpret.”
The exception would be if we were dealing with an extremely
large number of cases. But 593 breast cancers are anything but. In
fact, in two of those three aforementioned categories the outcome
was as close as possible to being non-statistically significant
while the third category also brushed up against
non-significance.
Ultimately, the authors display a mere will o’ the wisp. And
here’s an inconvenient statistic they didn’t bother to relay.
Breast cancer rates are much lower for black women than
white women. According to the National Institutes for Health, for
the latest year for which data are available (PDF), black women have only 84 percent the
rate of breast cancer as non-Hispanic white women. Could
reverse discrimination cause breast cancer?
Asians, incidentally, have 68 percent the rate of whites and
Hispanics 62 percent. Now here’s the real stunner. American
Indians, plagued by the inherent discrimination of the horrendous
reservation system, have less than half the breast cancer rate of
non-Hispanic whites.
That doesn’t exactly jibe with racism or perceived racism as a
carcinogen.
There is also no known biological explanation for why perceived
or actual discrimination would cause breast cancer. The authors
suggest stress. But nobody has yet found a link between stress and
cancer. Unable to proffer a single study showing such an
association, the authors instead choose to discuss stress and
hypertension!
Does all this sound a tad dishonest? It is. Reread their above
conclusion. Notice it doesn’t say “perceived racism,” but simply
“racism.” Yet obviously there was no way of measuring actual
discrimination, merely the perception of it. The conclusion is a
flat-out fabrication, sheer demagoguery wrapped in a mass of
numbers.
Black women and blacks generally do have higher rates of other
diseases than do whites. But the explanations for most, as with the
disparities in breast cancer, will lie primarily in genetics.
Lifestyle factors such as diet will also be important.
Discrimination, real or perceived, doesn’t cause cancer. Nor can
race-baiting at taxpayer expense prevent or cure it.
