The inspiration of this article comes from a conversation I had today with a co-worker whose ancestry descends from Nigeria. We work in an emergency room together, our experiences today is what initiated this conversation. Sickle Cell Anemia (SCA) is a homozygous recessive trait that causes an abnormality amongst red blood cells, hemoglobin is the protein in your red blood cells that is responsible for carrying oxygen. Sickle cell anemia is common in places where malaria amongst mosquitoes is prominent, natural selection promotes family pedigree who are resistant to the malaria disease. In turn, if a person is immune malaria they unfortunately carry the sickle cell trait. This immune population can either be heterozygous or homozygous recessive. Being diagnosed with sickle cell anemia brings many potential health risks including sickle cell crisis, vaso-occlusion blood clots to digits in infants, the spleen, lungs, etc. If someone has sickle cell anemia, they are immune-compromised, if their body were to come in contact with common bacterias that cause pneumonia, or common colds, without proper medical attention these bacterias can yield fatal results. The first link of my article is a video that gives insight on the pathophysiology, potential health risks, and treatment methods of sickle cell anemia. I recommend giving it a watch, as it is quite fascinating.
Reflecting back on the conversation with my co-worker, she began to explain some methods countries in Africa and South-East Asia use to try to mitigate the presence of this brutal disease in their countries. In her home country, it has gotten to the point where churches will not conduct a marriage unless the genotype of the parents is confirmed. If the engaged couple runs the risk of producing offspring who can suffer from SCA, the church will not conduct the marriage. While some may regard this as unethical, the prevalence of sickle cell in their country is alarming. It is estimated about 150,000 children in Nigeria have SCA, and nearly 25% of the country are heterozygous carriers of the trait. Since there is no cure for the disease, the only way to lower these numbers is to try to prevent it from being passed on. This was a very interesting topic to me, if anyone has more insight on this please leave a comment as I would like to learn more.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIIJmg_1hv0
Link: https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12910-019-0376-8
Link: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/sicklecell/data.html
Very interesting post Drew. I was unaware about the rules in Africa and South-East Asia that your co-worker enlightened you on. It is interesting to think that this is the approach that they take in order to prevent sickle cell from being passed on.
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