‘Nigeria Has 5million Sickle Cell Patients’

The Nigerian nation is
said to have a population of three to five million patients with Sickle Cell Anaemia (SCA) and 25 percent as carriers of the gene, a situation that portends a grave danger to the fight against the disorder.
Speaking to newsmen shortly after the 2016 Sickle Cell Awareness Day celebration at the Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital (BMSH), Port Harcourt, yesterday, the Chief Medical Director, Rivers State Hospitals Management Board, Dr. Dorathy A. Okoh said this percentage should also serve to awaken the consciousness of Nigerians on the choice of life partners should the aim of reducing the burden of Sickle Cell Disorder (SCD) be achieved in the nation.
Okoh who described reduction as the key to solving the problem of sickle cell disorder said “it has to begin at the primary level. There has to be a knowledge of one’s genotype beginning from the pediatric age-group to the adolescent and then to the adult age group. When this is detected early enough, there is a standardised and sustained care given to the patients at their different stages that would further translate into the reduction of the spread of the disorder”.
While noting that sickle cell disorder was an inherited disorder that is completely preventable if young people were properly informed and educated through counseling to under-go genotype test  before marriage, Okoh said this would aid the informed decision to marry the partner with the appropriate hemoglobin genotype and avoid the marriage between couples that are both AS or SC and AS carriers and whose offsprings would continue as carriers thereby leaving the scourge among us.
Okoh revealed that the BMSH has a comprehensive team of care-givers to sickle cell patients charged with the responsibility of, among other things, ensuring that  those that are born with the condition need not die in pain or even prematurely as they can be helped, adding that the hospital’s High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPCL) machine also helps to manage the patient even in the faces of other variances alongside its accurate result-testing ability.
Describing the sickle cell disorder as a multi-disciplinary disorder, Okoh said that the management of the disorder  needs the concerted effort of everyone including the doctors, nurses, health workers, stakeholders to come together and work towards ending the scourge.

Stories by Lady Godknows Ogbulu