How much is the cost of genotype test in Ghana? What is the importance of doing a genotype test?
Please read this story by a medical doctor working in children emergency in one of the teaching hospitals in Nigeria. You will understand the troubles of having a sickle cell anemic child and why you need to avoid it by doing your genotype test before marriage.
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“I just finished doing an Exchange Blood Transfusion (EBT) for a patient with sickle cell disease (SCD). Sitting here across the emergency room right now and observing my patient, i’m deep in thoughts.
An EBT simply put is a procedure where we replace a patients blood with another blood – we take out the blood in the person and replace it with a new one. We do the procedure more commonly for babies suffering from severe jaundice and for children with sickle cell Anemia.
By the way, i’m currently a Child Health Emergency Room Doctor at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH), Benin City. Every Doctor in this unit is laddened with the responsibility of promptly attending to and managing every emergency condition having to do with children. This makes us the first point of call for every child emergency that enters the hospital. As Doctors in this sensitive unit, we see and manage tons of emergencies daily and one of the most common conditions we see is Sickle Cell crisis.
Children living with SCD have tons of health problems to wade through in their lifetime and it begins from 5-6 months of age. They include; attacks of pain – commonly bone pains and chest pain, Anemia, swelling in hands and feet, priapism (sustained painful erection in the absence of physical or psychological stimulation), stroke, leg ulcers, aseptic bone necrosis (a part of the bone, especially the femur, suddenly starts dying due to lack of blood supply resulting in subsequent fracture at the hip joint), vision problems including sudden blindness, kidney problems, and a host of others.
This lifetime horror rests not with the child alone but also with the parents who are burdened with the responsibility of frequent hospital visits. The condition results when a man with AS genotype makes a baby with a woman having the same genotype. That said, i think young people really need to re-evaluate what they define love to be!
If you’re reading this post today and your genotype is AS, listen to me very carefully, you have no sexual or marital business with anybody having the same genotype. Yes, you don’t! You’re not mad! I know you must have read that it’s a game of chance or probability yeah? But this is one chance game you don’t want to mess with, i assure you!
When two AS genotype individuals make a baby, for every pregnancy, the baby has a 50% chance of being AA, 25% chance of being AS and 25% chance of being SS. Before you rejoice over these very deceptive possibilities, don’t forget it’s still a “probability” and asuch, while we’ve seen AS genotype couples who got so lucky and had all their kids with none of them having SS genotype, we’ve also seen tons of AS genotype couples who gave birth to 3, 4, 5 and even 8 children and they all had SS genotype! Strange right?!
Always ask about genotype first! That love will bail out on you when you’ll be by your sick child at the hospital every now and then. Trust me, you don’t want to bring another person into this world with that disease, the sufferings are immense and undesirable – I’ve seen it, I’ve been with them alot, I’ve managed many of them, so i can tell you!
If you truly love someone and you both have the AS genotype, think again, you really should let them go as that could be your highest demonstration of love for him/her and for yourself aswell and for the innocent unborn child.”
Have his story and health talks on the need genotype test before marriage taught you something? As Ghanaian, you should also know that Ghana has a large population of sickle cell patients – In Ghana, approximately 15,000 (2%) of Ghanaian newborns are diagnosed with Sickle Cell Disease annually. This could have just been prevented by doing a simple genetype test and knowing your genotype status.. Genotype test is cheap and affordable in Ghana so money shouldn’t be the problem.
How much is the cost of genotype test in Ghana?
Genotype test is a blood test. The cost of genotype test in Ghana is around GHC 30 – GHC 40 Ghana Cedis. In cities like Accra, Kumasi and Tamale, genotype test is around GHC 50 Ghana Cedis.
The story was culled from UBTH page on Facebook.
