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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Highest rates seen in American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian and Pacific Islander women

Asian + Pacific Islander is such a stupid fucking category. There is no way Japanese people, Pakistanis, and Samoans have remotely related biological factors for gestational diabetes. Or any other meaningful thing the government might care about that would justify grouping people together.

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This is just the lack of an Oxford comma. “Asian” and “Pacific Islander” are separate groups in the data list further down.

No, it’s mentioned because “Asian and Pacific Islander” is a specific, separate category for government’s data collection purposes. It was created as a result of Pacific Islander lobby. You can look up all of this.

I don’t know anything about the “Pacific Islander lobby” but it’s not relevant here. The sentence here is clearly just not using the Oxford comma. Only the summary for journalists uses this construction. The actual abstract does not.

This paper breaks out Asian and Pacific Islander as separate ethnic groups in their data. You can see it in this summary and in the slightly more detailed data if you click through to the paper on JAMA.

(Actually they break out “Non-Hispanic Asian” and “Non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander”. The need to call out “non-Hispanic” on every ethnicity seems weird.)

Good point, but Pakistanis and Japanese also don’t have anything in common in terms of biological risk factors either.

That’s probably mostly true. Grouping ethnicities into labels that are useful seems like a difficult problem. Especially as risk factors can be both generic and cultural.

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