ABOUT US

In 2006, physicians from Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital (http://www.brighamandwomens.org/) and University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia met to organize a sickle cell disease center. During 2007, specific plans were formulated, and funds were raised to launch the Center. A building in the University Teaching Hospital Center complex is being renovated to serve as a site for the Center. The US and Zambian physician team is being assisted by the Foundation for People Living with Sickle Cell Disease), established in 2005 by two young women who have the disease to increase awareness concerning sickle cell disease in Zambia.

The initial goals of the Center are as follows:

To establish a screening program to identify affected infants and children. A pilot screening effort will begin in the Lusaka area and in a selected health clinic in another part of the country.  The plan is eventually to provide screening nation-wide. Coupled with the screening program will be an education effort to help families understand the disease and to attend to the simple compliance measures that improve clinical outcome. For example, teaching mothers to detect one complication of sickle cell disease, acute enlargement of the spleen, reduced the mortality of this condition in Jamaica from 25% to 3%.

To catalogue the types of infections suffered by the UTH sickle cell disease patients; this data will inform downstream vaccination and prophylactic antibiotic strategies.

A subsequent goal is to perform the first trial of hydroxyurea in an underdeveloped, malaria-endemic country. If successful, introduction of hydroxyurea into other African countries could have an enormous positive impact.