Dry cerumen--a prevalent genetic trait among American Indians.

Wet and dry types of cerumen are believed to be inherited as simple Mendelian traits, in which the dry allele is recessive to the wet (sticky) allele. Petrakis, Molohon and Tepper, and recently, Martin and Jackson reported that certain Indian tribes in the United States have high frequencies of the allele for dry cerumen as do some Asian populations. Here the author reports new data on the frequencies of cerumen allele in various Indian tribes in North and South America, which indicates that the gene for dry cerumen is widely prevalent among American Indians.