the dailymail article is a farce and should be ignored. It fails to identify any of its supposed sources. The site is notorious for that. It's banned as a source on wikipedia. Not that they're wrong about arranged cousin marriages being more likely to produce children with genetic defects. That's undeniably true. But if they can't actually show you the research study then the numbers are probably just made up for the sake of sensationalism.
which study? and note this is talking about just the city of bradford and not the entire UK
All of this nonsense is based on the 1 fact they referenced of 545 people age 0-17 dying over the course of 5 years. Note that the statistic is just deaths, and NOT deaths due to a defect.
Here they have just super lazily copeid the following from the BBC article:
Which itself fails to cite the source for 13 times, 3%, 1/3. But I guess if you cite me saying "100% of all people are gay", then technically you had a source! good for you! Please note that the dailymail article is published in 2018 and citing a 2005 article from bbc as if it is completely up-to-date factual information LOL.
So here is the actual report:
https://www.phgfoundation.org/docume...1412153210.pdf
The dailymail claim is wildly off. The paper says that the number of infant deaths +still births due to autosomal recessive conditons was 38 fold higher in pakistani babies. NOT due to genetic disorders in general and NOT specific to cousin-marriages.
In fact, in table 5 you can see the ID+SB totals for all congenital anomalies:
Maternal Ethnic Groups SB+IDs Total Births
European 106 37,764
Pakistani 166 20,117
So 106/37764 = 0.0028
166/20117 = 0.0082
0.0082/0.0028 = 2.94. So a little less than 3 times as likely, nowhere close to the dailymail claim of 38 times. And since the data is not specific to cousin-marriages, it is entirely possible that a chunk of that difference is, as SJ suggested, due to the pakistani parents having a higher percentage of congenital anomalies themselves (although that gets into a who came first, the chicken or the egg? issue).
the next quote about a third dying before 5 is also bogus since it's specific to all british children born with "severe autosomal recessive disorders" and is not specific to pakistani children the way the dailymail tries to frame it as such.
Anyway, of course marrying blood relatives leads to a higher percentage of genetic disorders. But since people love to use shitty sources on here I thought it would be fun to show the bs that is being read as fact