Tina and Frank’s story was one like no other; they met at a friend’s party while Tina was a final year economics student at the university and Frank was a communication expert with one of the fast rising media companies in the country. It was obvious to all that what they shared wasn’t a joke, prior to this time Frank had begun his search for his future partner and Tina was ready for something serious. After the exchange numbers at the party, they met couple of times before officially deciding to date. During their courtship, both revealed that they were genotype AS—carriers of the much dreaded sickle cell. However this did not deter them even amidst suggestions from friends and family to call the relationship off as it would only lead to future misery; Two years later they wedded at a classy ceremony, where they were surrounded by wishers who wished them everything from heaven to earth! 
Two years later, Tina gave birth to a beautiful baby, who was thankfully AS. Another two years passed and Tina gave birth to yet another healthy girl. They felt they were due for a boy, within another year a bouncing baby boy came; he was beautiful but also sickly, and he was diagnosed with HbSS — then began their woes!
He was constantly in the hospital, constantly requiring close scrutiny and observation. Three years later, he died.
Sickle-cell disease (SCD), or sickle-cell anaemia (or anemia; SCA) or drepanocytosis, is an autosomal recessive genetic blood disorder with incomplete dominance, characterized by red blood cells that assume an abnormal, rigid, sickle shape. The sickle shape occurs because of a mutation in the haemoglobin gene. Life expectancy is shortened, with studies reporting an average life expectancy of 42 in males and 48 in females.
Sickle-cell disease, usually presenting in childhood, occurs more commonly in people (or their descendants) from parts of tropical and sub-tropical regions where malaria is or was common. One-third of all indigenous inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa carry the gene, because in areas where malaria is common, there is a fitness benefit in carrying only a single sickle-cell gene (sickle cell trait). Those with only one of the two alleles of the sickle-cell disease, while not totally resistant, are more tolerant to the infection and thus show less severe symptoms when infected. The disease is suffered by at least 12 million people, with 70% of them residing in Africa. The prevalence of the disease in the United States is approximately 1 in 5,000, mostly affecting Americans of Sub-Saharan African descent, according to the National Institutes of Health. In the United States, about 1 out of 500 African-American children born will have sickle-cell anaemia.
"From available statistics, 100,000 infants die from sickle-cell disease in Nigeria annually, making it the number one sickle-cell endemic country in Africa," Sadiq Wali, president of the Nigeria Sickle-Cell Foundation, told AFP. Sickle-cell anaemia is a specific form of sickle-cell disease in which there is homozygosity for the mutation that causes HbS. Sickle-cell anaemia is also referred to as "HbSS", "SS disease", "haemoglobin S" or permutations thereof. In heterozygous people, who have only one sickle gene and one normal adult haemoglobin gene, it is referred to as "HbAS" or "sickle cell trait". Other, rarer forms of sickle-cell disease include sickle-haemoglobin C disease (HbSC), sickle beta-plus-thalassaemia (HbS/β+) and sickle beta-zero-thalassaemia (HbS/β0). These other forms of sickle-cell disease are compound heterozygous states in which the person has only one copy of the mutation that causes HbS and one copy of another abnormal haemoglobin allele.
I know for a minute I was speaking jargon but simply put...
Sickle cell anemia is a condition in which your blood has a lower than normal number of red blood cells. This condition also can occur if your red blood cells don't contain enough hemoglobin. Usually, red blood cells are shaped like a doughnut without the hole, but sickle cell anemia results in sickle-shaped red blood cells.
The red blood cells are made in the spongy marrow inside the large bones of the body. Bone marrow is always making new red blood cells to replace old ones. Normal red blood cells live about 120 days in the bloodstream and then die. They carry oxygen and remove carbon dioxide (a waste product) from your body.
In sickle cell anemia, the number of red blood cells is low because sickle cells don't last very long. Sickle cells usually die after only about 10 to 20 days and the bone marrow can't make new red blood cells fast enough to replace the dying ones.
Sickle cell anemia is an inherited, lifelong disease. People who have the disease are born with it. They inherit two genes for sickle hemoglobin—one from each parent.
People who inherit a sickle hemoglobin gene from one parent and a normal gene from the other parent have a condition called sickle cell trait.
Sickle cell trait is different than sickle cell anemia. People who have sickle cell trait don't have the disease, but they have one of the genes that cause it. Like people who have sickle cell anemia, people who have sickle cell trait can pass the sickle hemoglobin gene on to their children.
This condition is termed a disease because the inherited abnormality causes an extreme and at times uncontrollable condition that can be very severe and deadly. History shows that this abnormality was first referred to as sickle cell anaemia in 1922 by Verne Mason, a medical resident at the John Hopkins Hospital. But the defining moment was in 1949 when Linus Paulings and colleagues demonstrated that sickle-cell disease occured as a result of an abnormality in the haemoglobin molecule. African medical literature report tales of obganjes (children who come and go) in the 1870s’ that were actually children suffering from this condition and could not survive the early childhood crises.
As earlier said, sickle cell disease could lead to multiple acute complications in patients which are at most times lethal. These complications are medically termed "sickle cell crisis" and they could be of many types including the vaso-occlusive crisis, aplastic crisis, sequestration crisis, haemolytic crisis and others. Most episodes of sickle cell crises last between five and seven days.
Sickle cell disease has caused a number of heartbreaks, in the sense that many relationships have been ended abruptly simply because the individuals were carriers or sufferers. But good news, those days are over.
Scientist may have discovered a new technology to prevent babies from being born with the deadly sickle cell anaemia, through embryo genetic testing which aims to ensure that the baby is born without little or any sickle cell trait.
Making this known last weekend, the consultant gynaecologist of the Garki hospital—Abuja, Dr Ibrahim Wada explained that the technology when fully operational will enable couples with the AS or SS genotype to marry and have children without the sickle cell. He said the technology is called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)
Wada lamented that sickle cell anaemia is a chronic debilitating genetic disorder common among Africans. He revealed that Nigeria has the highest rate accounting for over four million sufferers and 150000 children born with the disorder every year
Mr Chris Danga, a clinical embryologist at the hospital explained to journalists how the technology works. According to him, couples who preferred the option of PGD could have embryos generated through In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF), while the cells obtained from the embryos were tested for the presence of HbSS.
With such a technological advancement, such problems as shown in the story above could be avoided and it would be the answer to many people’s dreams.
certain rich businessman had a beautiful daughter, who fell in love with a guy who was a cleaner. When the girl's father came to know about their love, he did not like it at all, and so began to protest about it. Now it happened that the two lovers decided to leave their homes for a happy future.
Your idea of a perfect world: where things never go wrong. Thoughts, pictures, images and scenes roam freely without any hindrance. What you want appears to happen how, where and when you want it to happen. No energy is expended. Just you and your thoughts: those solitary trips in the pathways of your mind. Interconnected twists and turns of mental images at the corners of your mind; stretching the elasticity of your mind beyond the limitations of the physical world; creating your own movie, where all the characters are created by you and in which the hero or heroine of the movie is definitely YOU. Refusing to allow the external overwhelm the internal. Drowning in a sea of imaginary ideas and absorbing every moment of its fantasy. Ignoring the present while envisaging a glorious future.
If this “Dream Factor” is lacking, you are not different from any other animal, because God gave you a mind so you could create and recreate the world around you. God does not expect the same breed to do the same things the same way. He commanded us to be fruitful and to multiply and subdue the earth. How can we do this if we do not explore virgin lands, untapped potentials and unused senses?
The Return of Jenifa (ROJ) finally hits Naija as the movie will be premiered at the Muson Centre Onikan Lagos. Speaking on the American premiere of the movie, Funke Akindele said, ‘It feels good not only to have ‘The Return of Jenifa’ premiered in the United States but to know that the movie has no geographical limit. Our decision to premiere the movie abroad was strictly based on the demand of the Jenifa fans and that is what makes it all exciting’.
The movie, which was directed by DJ Tee of DJ Tee Films, was produced by Funke Akindele.
