Sickle Cell Anemia, Human Variation And Race

7 Pages 1830 Words

1910 marks the period that sickle-cell anemia was linked to race. In Chicago Dr. James Herrick detailed a “new disorder” that he located in a black patient from the Caribbean who was ill with lesions and fatigue. Dr. Herrick described the illness as “anemia with peculiar and elongated red blood cells”(Tapper, 1). By the 1920s laboratory medicine grew and several other physicians named these elongated red blood cells “sickle-cell.” Sickle-cell disease includes numerous conditions resulting from inheriting the HbS either homozygously or as a compound heterozygote with other abnormal hemoglobin genes (McElroy, 23). During the foundational period for research, physicians who concentrated their work in sickling, “sickle cell trait, a genetic mutation, and sickle cell anemia, the disease that affects persons who inherit the mutated gene from both parents” (Tapper, 1) emphasized racial markers. The fact that the vast majority of people in the United States with sickling are of African descent helps to fuel the inaccurate idea that it is a black phenomenon.
Sickling researchers introduce history and geography to explain the disease as “black related.” The most prevalent space for sickling, early observers reported, was located in the black persons of Equatorial Africa and descendants of West Africans throughout the world. Sickle cell-hemoglobin C or HbC, is most common in West Africa and is generally found in people of West African origin. HbC is distributed in West African and reaches up to 20 percent in Northern Ghana and the adjacent Upper Volta region (McElroy, 28). HbC persons seldom suffer from serious disease. People who have inherited only one HbS gene also do not suffer from sickle-cell disease because the majority of their “hemoglobin is normal” which “prevents the abnormal hemoglobin (HbS) from forming fibers distorting blood cells”(Molnar, 143). People with the SS hemoglobin (individuals wh...