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Good morning. The conclusion of a review commissioned by the NHS's Race and Health Observatory is stark - newborns from minority ethnic backgrounds risk late diagnosis of serious conditions and poorer health in the long term just because current neonatal tests, devised some 70 years ago, were designed for white babies. Some of these tests involve assessing a baby's skin tone - to identify jaundice, for example, or insufficient oxygen in the blood. And the guidance associated with these tests on healthy and unhealthy indicators refer to skin as 'pink', 'pale' and as turning 'blue' or 'grey' - yet these markers just don't work for those with darker skin tones. Neonatal death rates in the UK are much higher among black and Asian newborns than for white babies - and those tests are said to be part of the problem. Having just read this story I had cause to go over to the Chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge, and found myself looking up at the mid-Victorian stained glass which fills the windows. 120 worthies get a panel each - two thirds of them are key figures in the early history of Christianity and its spread in England, the other third, are founders, benefactors and luminaries of the University and College. From Christ's disciples to Isaac Newton in 120 steps - and everyone a white face. In part of course, that reflects a simple fact of history - founders and benefactors such as Edward III, Henry VIII and his two daughters Mary and Elizabeth were what we would call white, as early depictions of them tell us. But up near the altar end of the Chapel, there has been some very definite white washing. There you find a collection of Africans - Tertullian, Cyprian, Perpetua, Augustine and his mother Monica, all from Carthage or thereabouts in what is now Tunisia. And yet Augustine, to stick with him, although he is almost certainly of Berber origin as likely some of the others, is here, as is usual, a very passable and pallid father Christmas. Getting your history right, and getting tests for newborn babies right, are two different things for sure - and the latter is more urgent than the former. But when we efface the diversity of our history it seems sadly in tune with effacing the diversity of our current populations. Ironically perhaps, on the outside wall of Trinity Chapel, above the large east window and facing the street, there is a quotation in Latin of great words from Isaiah: 'my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.' Isaiah is termed a prophet - meaning not someone who predicts remarkable events far in the future, but who declares how God would have our future be - and that is a future 'for all peoples', which effaces not our differences, but our divisions and our disregard of the other.
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