FlowerChild
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Fumarase Deficiency
Fifteen years ago, a strange-looking child suffering from severe physical maladies and acute retardation was brought into the office of Dr. Theodore Tarby.
Tarby's young patient was afflicted with an extremely rare disease called fumarase deficiency. "I had never seen a patient with it," Tarby says. "Right away I asked the parents if there were any other children with the same problem."
The parents said their daughter had cerebral palsy. Tarby asked them to bring the girl to him for an examination."As soon as I saw her, I knew she had the same thing as her brother," Tarby says.
By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah. Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding.
"We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition," Tarby says. "If you cross a Barlow and Jessop, you stand a high risk of getting this condition," Tarby says.
There is no cure for the disease, which impedes the body's ability to process food at the cellular level.
"This problem is going to get worse and worse and worse," predicts 40-year-old Isaac Wyler, another lifelong Colorado City resident who was excommunicated from the FLDS in January 2004. Wyler's ex-wife's sister has had two babies afflicted with fumarase deficiency. "Right now, we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg."
For more than 70 years, all marriages in the isolated towns have been arranged by the leader of the FLDS, a breakaway sect of the Salt Lake City-based Mormon Church. Marriages among first and second cousins have been common for decades in the community, where religious doctrine requires men to have at least three wives to gain eternal salvation. Only the FLDS prophet can arrange and perform polygamous marriages, and those marriages are taking place in a community in which almost everybody is related.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2005-12-29/news/forbidden-fruit/
Fifteen years ago, a strange-looking child suffering from severe physical maladies and acute retardation was brought into the office of Dr. Theodore Tarby.
Tarby's young patient was afflicted with an extremely rare disease called fumarase deficiency. "I had never seen a patient with it," Tarby says. "Right away I asked the parents if there were any other children with the same problem."
The parents said their daughter had cerebral palsy. Tarby asked them to bring the girl to him for an examination."As soon as I saw her, I knew she had the same thing as her brother," Tarby says.
By the late 1990s, Tarby and his team had discovered fumarase deficiency was occurring in the greatest concentration in the world among the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah. Of even greater concern was the fact that the recessive gene that triggers the disease was rapidly spreading to thousands of individuals living in the community because of decades of inbreeding.
"We have and will have a continual output of children with this condition," Tarby says. "If you cross a Barlow and Jessop, you stand a high risk of getting this condition," Tarby says.
There is no cure for the disease, which impedes the body's ability to process food at the cellular level.
"This problem is going to get worse and worse and worse," predicts 40-year-old Isaac Wyler, another lifelong Colorado City resident who was excommunicated from the FLDS in January 2004. Wyler's ex-wife's sister has had two babies afflicted with fumarase deficiency. "Right now, we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg."
For more than 70 years, all marriages in the isolated towns have been arranged by the leader of the FLDS, a breakaway sect of the Salt Lake City-based Mormon Church. Marriages among first and second cousins have been common for decades in the community, where religious doctrine requires men to have at least three wives to gain eternal salvation. Only the FLDS prophet can arrange and perform polygamous marriages, and those marriages are taking place in a community in which almost everybody is related.
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2005-12-29/news/forbidden-fruit/