Sickle cell disease still seeking solutions

Saturday, July 24, 2010 (The Mirror Pg 13)

By Rebecca Kwei
This year, 2010, marks 100 years since the medical world was made aware of sickle cell disease through the first publication in the scientific literature and yet it remains a major health problem still seeking solutions that will benefit people with the disease.
Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood disorder that affects red blood cells. One person cannot get it from another one.
The disease is inherited from both parents and not just from the mother. Most people with AS or AC blood are not aware of it and do not know they can have children with sickle cell disease.
It is estimated that more than 350,000 babies are born with sickle cell disease in Africa every year. Less that two per cent of babies born in rural Africa with the most severe form of the disease survive beyond five years and sickle accounts for more than six per cent of all mortality in young children in Africa.
In Ghana, it is estimated that 12,000 babies are born with sickle cell annually.
Clearly with such statistics of people suffering from sickle cell, especially children, the First Lady, Mrs Naadu Mills, hit the nail on the head when she called on scientists and governments at the first global congress on sickle cell disease taking place in Accra to do a lot more about the disease than they had done in the past.
"Being very much concerned over the plight of families affected by the disease, it is my personal hope that the results of the congress will lead to reduced death, pain and suffering of our children and adults with sickle cell disease and that strategies will be adopted to increase health education, screening, and counselling in order to reduce the public health burden of the disease," she said.
Mrs Mills mentioned that examples in several countries show that with early diagnosis of the disease through new-born screening, family health education, antibiotic prophylaxis and organised comprehensive medical care, children need not die early or suffer painful and debilitated lives.
The Minister of Health, Dr Benjamin Kunbour, who acknowledged that modern medical services had not paid much attention to non-communicable, genetic diseases such as sickle cell, however, gave the assurance that his ministry was committed to developing policies to bring about the establishment of sickle cell disease as one of the public health priorities.
"The Ghana Health Service, with support from the World Health Organisation, has recently developed a document titled "Strategic framework for the management, prevention and control of sickle cell disease in Ghana". It is the desire of government to adopt this framework to develop educational, screening, and clinical programmes throughout the country," he assured.
As a first step, Dr Kunbour said government has committed itself to the scale up of the pilot New-born Screening Project carried out in Kumasi and Tikrom into a National Programme of New-born Screening for Sickle Cell Disease.
The pilot screening programme initiated by Prof. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong of the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, with funding from the US National Institutes of Health and led in Ghana by Prof. Francis Nkrumah of the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research, has proven the feasibility of this life-saving programme in Africa.
Dr Kunbour said as of December 2009, the new-born screening project in Kumasi and Tikrom had screened more than 300,000 new-borns, found more than 5,000 babies with sickle cell disease and had enrolled close to 4,000 of them at the Sickle Cell Clinic at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi for regular and comprehensive management.
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Sicke Cell Foundation of Ghana, Dr Kwame D. Fordwor, said the foundation in the past five years has worked in collaboration with other organisations to initiate the national new-born screening programme with assistance from the government of Brazil which resulted in the signing of the Brazil-Ghana Technical Co-operation Agreement in Sickle Cell Disease in October last year, among others.