source: Kenyan Digest

year: 2020

When he was only seven, and on holiday at the Kenyan coast with his family, young Etemesi Ochola felt an unfamiliar pain in his right hand. He couldn’t move it. His worried parents would then rush him to hospital when he couldn’t even bend the limb. “Several tests were performed on me and the results showed that I had sickle cell anaemia,” Ochola, now 35, explains.

“On coming back to Nairobi from holiday, the pain worsened. It was too much I had to be admitted at the hospital for them to manage it,” he recalls. His uncle also had the condition, and it was his counsel the family would count on a lot to understand what was happening.

In most cases, many, about 50 to 80 per cent of those diagnosed with the disease, die before reaching adulthood. A study by WHO indicates that sickle cell anaemia is associated with a very high rate of deaths among children in Africa.

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