Eid Mubarak

 

عيدكم مبارك. كل عام وأنتم بخير.

Eid Mubarak.

Happy 4th & 5th of July!

Happy 4th of  July to my American friends, and 5th of July to my Algerian friends and the same to people in Cape Verde, and Venezuela.

Ramadan Kareem

كل عام وانتم بخير

Sickle Cell Anemia

Bahrain Society for Sickle Cell Anemia Patient Care (Website) has been trying to raise awareness about the Sickle Cell disease and the premarital tests or genetic counseling that can detect the mutation causing the disease predicting the chances of inheriting the disease in a couple’s offspring. The Society has called for more attention to Sickle Cell Patients and made recommendations to the Ministry of Health in Bahrain, among those recommendations was a study demonstrating the need for a Sickle Cell Anemia Patient Care unit and how such a unit can prevent some of the tragedies that happen to families and friends that we read about in newspapers constantly.

Having little help from the private sector, and facing the problems of the limited resources of the Ministry of Health and the public's ignorance about the disease, the society is struggling in its fight against it, while the number of people living with the disease or carrying it is increasing with more couples having or carrying the disease ignoring doctors recommendations and having children who end up with the disease as well.

Sickle Cell is a life-long disease that can manifest with many symptoms and can lead to many complications. Patients with the disease suffer attacks or what is referred to as “Sickle cell crisis”. The severity of these attacks depends on the severity of the condition and the type of the disease the patient has.

Sickle Cell is inherited from parents the same way blood type is inherited. It is caused by a mutation in hemoglobin genes. Those genes have two alleles, this means that there are 3 basic conditions for this disease, either you have it (you have 2 abnormal alleles), or you don’t (2 normal alleles) or you carry it (1 normal allele and 1 abnormal allele).

The picture above shows what happens when a couple with Sickle cell trait (carriers) have kids. 25% of their kids will have the disease, and 25% will not have it while the rest 50% will be carriers like their parents. Carriers do not suffer the symptoms of the disease while people who have the disease suffer symptoms and complications ranging from agonizing pain to lethal attacks.

The society, trying to use a different approach toward awareness about the disease, have contacted a group of the highest religious clerks and scholars from the different sects to produce a “Fatwa” that will discourage couples who have the disease or carry it from marrying or having kids. Responses from some of the scholars said that this kind of marriage is forbidden (haram), while others said it’s not haram but it is highly recommended that it be avoided.

Of course, the need to get such a Fatwa to get the point heard in the first place is absurd so I won't comment on that, you gotta do what you gotta do, and if it works then great. But parents with this disease should keep in mind the price they’re making their kids pay and if the majority of the responses from religious clerks do not discourage this, then that doesn’t mean throwing caution and reason to the wind and making their future kids suffer the consequences.

 * Edited picture (Original is courtesy of DukeHealth.org)

World Cup

The World Cup has started today. Football enthusiasts are really ecstatic about this important event, and people who don’t care much about football (like me), well, they usually don’t care but since it is an international event you can't avoid hearing about it.

This time the Brazil world cup comes in an awkward time. Between political problems in the middle east and wars everywhere, it is competing for coverage with news about Syria where the civil war is still raging on and have spilled into Iraq where the political system seems to be disintegrating. And while it seems to be an opportunity for the world to rise above political problems in the spirit of sportsmanship, it only served to draw attention to the political and social problems in Brazil.

On the level of games played, I'm no expert, but everyone seems to be discontent with the performance of whichever team they support and so far it has been disappointing even tho it just started. Even the opening event seems to have not lived up to the hype and anticipation it generated.

In our region, where hardly any Arab county qualified for the world cup, the hype is even more feverish, leading to the question of why it is so? I think in other places of the world where there’s a large range of things to do, you can choose to not care about such an international event, however in a our region and especially in a small place like Bahrain where you don’t have much to do for fun you can't make that choice.

While the insanity this year has not lived up to the level seen in South Africa, it is still noteworthy. Maybe people need something like the world cup to show them that people around the world live and can play together to make them forget about the horrible things around the world. But with the commercialization of the event and its coverage even this aspect of sports is losing some of it's value because now the poor cannot afford to even watch it on TV since it is only broadcasted by private networks who hold exclusive rights to show it.

Football was considered the poor man's sport at some time, but now between clubs who buy players with obscene amounts of money (more than the annual budget of a small state) and networks who buy exclusive rights to show games, maybe it's time the poor invented a new sport.

Here we go, again!

One of my friends asked me about my blog and if I stopped blogging because I got bored. The truth is I had so many things on my plate and something had to go, between work, family/social obligations and trying to exercise and get back in shape little time is left. Of course losing my web-host and having to start over didn't help matters.

I suppose I never realized that I enjoy blogging and that it was my hobby as well as a way to practice my writing and publish some of my works, until I stopped. And that's how I came to realize that I don't want to close my blog and so I made it again on a more reliable host. Here we go (again).