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In rising to the editor's challenge to write this glossary I am conscious that I am summarising and reigniting longstanding controversies. This paper comprises a personal viewpoint, a summary of the current position, and a signpost for the way forward. The glossary is limited by my knowledge and experience, which mainly derives from the UK population context, with some observations in the USA and Europe. It is unlikely, however, that the "state of the art" is advanced enough to achieve more than a context-specific perspective. In the future, if conceptual advances can be achieved, and principles on how to operationalise the concepts agreed, an internationally applicable glossary may emerge.
As a Punjabi born Indian raised in Scotland I found the popular UK label "Asian" to describe people like me as simplistic. In 1984 I learned that this label was embedded in the scientific literature. In publications in the 1980s I took the unusual step of defining Asian, for example, "For the purposes of this study, Asian refers to persons whose ancestry is from the Indian subcontinent". I also tried italicising the word Asian and putting it in quotations to alert the reader to the limited use of the word. In retrospect these steps were insufficient. I realised that in the United States Asian was interpreted as far Eastern Asian populations. 1 In my writing I started to provide a statement on my use of terms, sometimes as an introductory paragraph as indicated in the appendix.
This paper shares my struggle, with the hope that others will help resolve the problems. In 1990, I wrote that an internationally agreed vocabulary was the ideal. 2 Sadly, there has been little progress towards this goal. This paper will also end with a plea for work on an internationally agreed glossary. The full bibliography on the journal web site ( http://www.jech.com/supplemental ) gives a sample of the scientific debate.
NEED FOR THE VARIABLES OF ETHNICITY AND RACE IN EPIDEMIOLOGY AND PUBLIC HEALTH
The concepts of ethnicity and race in health care and public health raise difficult ethical issues, which have seldom been explicitly considered. 3 Ethnicity and race are controversial variables in epidemiology and public health, including the many branches of these disciplines, and yet they are of...