So my always-bet-on-the-Cajun-jockey horse-betting strategy seemed to have failed at the Belmont, where Kent Desormeaux had his Triple Crown dreams quashed by Big Brown. Sorry if I lost you money.

ESPN did this piece on Kent’s kid Jacob, who has a genetic disease that made him deaf at birth and will most likely leave him blind by his early 20s. But the piece doesn’t go into detail about the disease, Usher syndrome.

Usher is one of a handful of genetic disorders unusually common among Cajuns; the others are Tay-Sachs, Charcot-Marie-Tooth, and Friedreich’s ataxia. Since all Cajuns are descended at least in part from around 6,000 Acadian exiles from Nova Scotia in the 1700s, a few mutations about 10 generations ago and led to their bizarre frequency among Cajuns. Oddly, Tay-Sachs (usually thought of as a disease for Ashkenazi Jews) is also common among some French-speaking Quebecois communities, but Cajuns have the same mutation as the Jews, not the same as their Francophone cousins.

More about the Cajun diseases here and here and here and here (warning: music at that last link).

09 June 2008

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