Rh segregation distortion: an artifact of ascertainment bias?

Abstract

On the basis of Rh blood group data on mother-child pairs collected from the maternity clinic of a hospital in Chile, Valenzuela and Harb postulated that there is a significant segregation distortion at the Rh locus. For data collected from a hospital, biases of ascertainment cannot be ruled out. For the Rh blood group locus, there is a strong possibility of preferential admission of Rh(-) pregnant women, especially of those Rh(-) women with Rh(+) husbands. We show that the evidence of segregation distortion vanishes when the possibility of such preferential admissions are taken into account.