LONDON: Britain's huge Pakistani community should be legally prevented from marrying first cousins, a Labour Party MP has declared, after new research showed Pakistani families produced an alarming 30% of the UK's genetically diseased children.

The research, conducted by the BBC and broadcast to a shocked nation on Tuesday, found that at least 55% of the community was married to a first cousin.

This is thought to be linked to the probability that a British Pakistani family is at least 13 times more likely than the general population to have children with recessive genetic disorders.

The research found that while British Pakistanis accounted for just 3.4% of all births, they had 30% of all British children with recessive disorders and a higher rate of infant mortality.

On Wednesday, Ann Cryer, the outspoken Labour MP for the Pakistani-populated Yorkshire constituency of Keighley, said it was time to stop being "politically correct."

With foresight, she insisted "it's not racist" to discuss the need for Britain's Pakistanis to adopt a different lifestyle and look outside their families for husbands and wives.

She admitted it was a "challenge" but cautioned that she was not challenging "Pakistani culture." Commentators said the research and Cryer's call to stop such marriages would stir a hornet's nest because the Pakistani community sees it as a culturally fundamental tradition.

The ugly new health vs culture focus on British Pakistanis comes just days after separate new research described them as languishing at the bottle of the social mobility league table.

Recessive genetic illnesses include cystic fibrosis and are thought to be more likely in children whose parents are related by blood.

The likelihood of unrelated couples having the same variant genes that cause recessive disorders is estimated to be 100 to one but it spirals dramatically to as much as one in eight in first-cousin unions.

The MP said the Pakistani propensity to marrying close relations was just one of Britain's many "public health issues", such as "smoking, drinking, obesity."

The focus on the British Pakistani habit of marriages between cousins or uncle and niece comes months after the BBC brought it into focus in a film, Marrying My Cousin.

The film, which underlined the inherent genetic risks in such unions, quoted Pakistani Neila Butt, who has two children with first cousin-husband Farooq to defend the tradition by explaining the newlyweds "have an understanding, you have the same family history."

The research said that in the Pakistani-dominant Bradford, more than three quarters of all Pakistani marriages were between first cousins and the city's main hospital had identified more than 140 different recessive disorders among local children, compared with the usual 20-30.

But sections of the Pakistani community pointed to recent government-funded research from America, where only 26 states and the District of Columbia allow first cousins to marry.

The research, issued last April, said laws prohibiting cousins from marrying are "a form of genetic discrimination." It said the risk of genetic problems in children born in such marriages was not as great as commonly perceived.

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