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NHS defends cousin marriages because ‘only 15 percent lead to birth defects’ (www.yahoo.com)

submitted 1 week ago by bytesonbike@discuss.online to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Midwives have been told about the benefits of “close relative marriage” in training documents that minimise the risks to couples’ children.

The documents claim “85 to 90 per cent of cousin couples do not have affected children” and warn staff that “close relative marriage is often stigmatised in England”, adding claims that “the associated genetic risks have been exaggerated”.

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[–] stephen01king@piefed.zip 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Isn't the problem being that the probability increases with each subsequent generations? That's why having a child with a cousin should be discouraged, to prevent the accumulation of bad recessive genes.

[–] workerONE@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If you have one person with recessive genes and one person with dominant genes, then the baby will have the dominant gene. So if the grandparents were cousins both with recessive genes it wouldn't matter, as far as I know.

[–] stephen01king@piefed.zip 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The thing is, with subsequent incestual generations, the likelihood of the recessive gene manifesting increases a lot. So, the problem is not a single generation of incest, it's the normalisation of incest that might lead to multiple generations doing it.

[–] workerONE@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh I see what you're saying. I did some reading earlier that said that in a lot of places 20% - 40% of all marriages are to first cousins.

[–] stephen01king@piefed.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, plenty of places where first cousin marriages are still not uncommon.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago

theres also dominant alleles that are the disease state, it also gets complicated when theres partial penetrance since its only half an half.