African albinos

Part of a physician's duty, one could argue, is to help protect the vulnerable--whether that means reporting child or elder abuse, ensuring informed consent, or preventing the possible leak of someone's HIV/AIDS status. Currently, health care workers (among other social service personnel) are busy in Tanzania, trying to provide safety and care for albino individuals. See here and here.

There are two main threats to albinos in East Africa: one is skin cancer (what happens when you take a phenotype already prone to cutaneous malignancy and add tropical doses of UV light); the other is 'poaching,' a term usually reserved for animals, but which seems to capture the brutality of the attacks on these people. Local...um...I don't think there's really a PC word for witch-doctor...local animist and Voudoun practitioners claim albino body parts are powerful charms for luck and riches; others use albino blood in their spells. The world is a wide and strange place. But lest we assume that these people are (to quote a commenter on one of the sites) "superstitious, bestial savages," let's remember that--killing aside--a lot of people in the US still wouldn't want to shake hands with an HIV positive person, or someone with psoriasis. Suprisingly, albinism is exponentially more common in Tanzania than in the US.

What got me started on this train of thought? Why, studying vitiligo for my dermatology exam, of course.