A country where love or marriage depends on genetic testing!

The Dhaka Times Desk A really strange country. A country where love or marriage depends on genetic testing! Have you ever heard of a strange country?

In most countries of the world, people enter into relationships like love or marriage according to their own choice. But now there is news of a country where love or marriage depends on gene testing! That country is Nigeria. Currently, marriageable men and women have to think about future generations before falling in love or marriage. They have to think about relationships like marriage based on genetic testing. This is because a significant number of people in the country carry certain genes that may be responsible for sickle cell disease (SCD) in the future.

Nigerian communication expert Demilola Ogunpebi recently got married. But he had to go a long way to get married. He had to search for a suitable bride in many ways. Although he liked many of them, he did not get married because the results of the gene tests of two people were not satisfactory.

Demilola Ogunpebi said, I had to search for a long time before I found my current partner. So there was the problem of appropriate genotypes. Whenever I went on a 'date' with someone the first question I had to face was - What is your genotype? Even after meeting many people in this way, the relationship never progressed due to mismatched genotypes. Basically, the people of the country express their reluctance to form a relationship like marriage with those who have the quality of sickle cell disease in their genes.

According to media reports, sickle cell disease is basically an inherited blood disorder. That is, it is passed to the next generation through the blood of the parents. Blood cells in people with SCD are usually C-shaped. Hemoglobin in healthy blood transports oxygen throughout the body. Hemoglobin in the blood of a healthy person is usually smooth, round and malleable. However, the amount of hemoglobin in the blood of people with SCD is abnormal. Anemia, unbearable pain and other symptoms also appear in the body of such patients. Therefore, when such individuals marry and give birth to children without genotype testing, the risk of those children being affected by sickle cell disease remains high. More than 150,000 children are born with SCD in Nigeria every year - one of the highest rates in the world.

In 2006, the World Health Organization reported that an average of 24 percent of people in the country carried the sickle cell gene. At least 20 babies per thousand are born with sickle cell.