Basic health interventions may significantly reduce deaths among young children with sickle cell anemia.The illness causes the body to produce sickle or disc shaped red blood cells making it difficult for them to transport oxygen from the lungs.The number of newborns with the inherited blood disease is increasing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.A new study in PLOS Medicine says by 2050 over 400-thousand babies will be born every year with sickle cell anemia.That’s an increase of about 100-thousand per year. Most of those births will occur in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and India.The three countries accounted for 75 percent of sickle cell newborns in 2010.Dr. Frederic Piel led the research by the University of Oxford, Imperial College and the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Program in Kenya.“It’s a genetic disorder and if you inherit one copy of the gene from one of your parents, you don’t have any symptoms and you’re called a carrier or a heterozygote individual.If you inherit two copies from your parents, then you have sickle cell anemia, which is quite severe and lethal in countries where there is no treatment available,” he said.While most of the sickle cell cases currently are concentrated in a few countries, Piel said there is a growing global burden.
