Birth defects ‘will rise as cousins wed’

London's leading children's hospital today warned that the number of babies with birth defects will soar because of a rise in first-cousin marriages among immigrants.

Great Ormond Street said it was preparing to treat more children born blind or deaf, and genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia, conditions which seriously affect people all their lives.

Doctors said growing numbers of people from Asian countries such as Pakistan, where marriages between first cousins are more common, were expected to settle here.

Two per cent of babies in Britain are born with a serious disability but for couples who are first cousins the figure more than doubles to about five per cent. A rise in the overall population and the age at which women have children are also likely to increase birth abnormalities, doctors said.

The hospital's annual plan said: "Increasing immigration, accompanied with the increasing incidence of first-cousin marriages in the UK, will lead to a greater level of serious congenital abnormalities which require treatment from specialist centres such as Gosh."

In a Dispatches documentary to be shown on Channel 4 tonight, a British-born Pakistani woman tells how childhood deaths and deafness plagued her family because her grandparents were first cousins.

Tazeen Ahmad says her mother was the first girl in her family to live beyond infancy. Five of her sisters died. Three of her uncles are deaf. She claims that more than half of British Pakistanis marry their cousins and in Bradford the figure rises to three- quarters. Such relationships are also common in East African, Middle Eastern and Bangladeshi communities.

Great Ormond Street said it does not keep records of how many patients come from first-cousin marriages but nearly four in 10 are from non-white ethnic groups.