But I thought we needed fertile foreigners to help pay for our medical entitlements, not suck them dry!
Now, Ann Cryer is urging the National Health Service to be more proactive in warning Asian families of the dangers of cousin marriage. She said: “I have encountered cases of blindness and deafness. There was one poor girl who had to have an oxygen tank on her back and breathe from a hole in the front of her neck. The parents were warned they should not have any more children. But when the husband returned again from Pakistan, within months they had another child with exactly the same condition.”
The Sunday Times points to medical research which finds that although British of Pakistani origins account for 3% of total births in Britain, they nonetheless account for one in three children born in Britain who suffer a genetic illness.
The Telegraph states that more than 55% of British Pakistanis are married to their first cousins. With the high incidence of shared recessive genes leading to birth defects and congenital illness, the only explanation for the rise of such conditions is through inbreeding, much of which has gone on for generations.