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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A gene for congenital lactase deficiency.

It's harmless for me since I don't actually have congenital lactase deficiency, you need the gene from both parents for it to possibly actually trigger in a baby... but my infant son does have it, and it made the first weeks at the hospital very scary for us (it means serious lactose intolerance right from birth including for mother's milk), until they found the proper diagnosis and started feeding him lactose-free formula. After the first year passes, which is pretty soon, it's just going to be a equivalent to normal lactose intolerance and easy to deal with, but if they didn't have the modern scientific knowledge about this, he would have died miserably in few weeks from birth.

There's only, like, 60 known cases of congenital lactase deficiency in the world, 50 of them in Finland, and the Finnish cases are connected to two specific, fairly low-population regions in Finland, one of which happens to be the one where both me and my wife have some roots.