sickle cell disease

Scitech has an article that notes the actual mortality from sickle cell disease is much higher than reported because it is the underlying problem of the stroke etc.

It is also, by the way, one reason that in the US we see a higher mortality in black patients, especially children.

When other sources of data on prevalence and birth incidence were combined with mortality data in epidemiological modeling, in 2021, the “total mortality burden” of sickle cell disease was 373,000 deaths, compared to 34,600 sickle-cell-only deaths, or “cause-specific deaths.” The increase was especially pronounced in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the fatality figures were 67 times higher and nine times higher, respectively.

south asia?

maybe they mean all forms of hemoglobinopathies, including sickle trait and thalessemia?

n 2021, half a million babies were born with sickle cell disease, and more than three-quarters of these births were in sub-Saharan Africa. Under the analysis of total mortality burden (including secondary conditions), sickle cell disease was the 12th leading cause of death globally for children under the age of 5 years. However, total sickle cell disease mortality burden was among the top three causes of death in Portugal, Jamaica, Libya, Oman, and San Marino.

original article in Lancet Hemotology. 

and yes it does include varients including Thalessemia.

We see a lot of sickle cell disease in the USA (our next door neighbor's cousing died of it alas at age 32).

But we only had one case when I worked in Zimbabwe, because we didn't have malaria in the high veldt. The case was a child of a miner from Malawi and I had to instruct the lab how to do the test to see the sickle cells under the micrsoscope because doinga  hemoglobin analysis was not available in our rural hospital and too expensive even if it was.

When I worked in Massachusetts we had a lot of Portuguese patients due to the fishing industy and yes when we saw microcytic anemia we checked for this.