Can a Disease Fail to Be Diverse Enough?

just before lunchtime on Wednesday, the 26th of November 2008 by Katie

Would a college drop a charity drive because the disease is not diverse enough in its victims?

Hint: many white men might know the answer to this.

“The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not “inclusive” enough.”

According to their “experts” “Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.”

Is a disease less worthy of a charitable event, because the victims are primarily of one race? In this case, white. Are they suggesting that the disease should somehow “branch out” and attack others, also?

Cystic fibrosis is a horrible, painful disease. A killer. It dramatically shortens a person’s lifespan (average life span of a sufferer is mid 30’s), it is incurable and hereditary. The sufferers of this disease truly suffer. It is painful, scary, debilitating disease.

And it is expensive. One of my former jobs was in health insurance (yea, I know, complain to me later). One of the “cases” that I was responsible for was a young girl, probably Hispanic. She was about 10 years old at the time. She was the first insured that I ever saw actually “max out” her lifetime medical benefits (at the time, that was 2 million dollars paid). She was in and out of hospitals for years. Her family never knew it, but I was really “pulling for her”. Sadly enough, she passed away soon after her medical benefit maxed out.

Wasn’t she “worthy” of research moneys? A young girl with a hereditary disease who suffered for years - isn’t she and sufferers like her worthy of research and research dollars?

Well, according to this college, no, because the disease only attacks white people.