Keep 500 Sick Kids Alive in Crisis-Hit Communities

Hello Partners, 

I wanted to share with you an area that is often overlooked in sickle cell care

Children with sickle cell disease have functional asplenia, meaning their spleen cannot effectively fight bacteria. This makes them extremely vulnerable to infections that most children recover from easily. For them, illnesses like pneumonia, meningitis, and influenza can become lifethreatening within hours. 

Routine childhood vaccines are essential, but they are not enough for sickle cell children. These children need enhanced immunization including broader pneumococcal protection, expanded meningococcal vaccines.

In Northern Nigeria, many sickle cell children have never completed their routine immunization, let alone the enhanced vaccines they desperately need. Conflict, displacement, and collapsed health systems mean many clinics are closed,vaccines are unavailable and unaffordable

Your support allows us to provide enhanced immunization to sickle cell children who would otherwise be left behind.

With your donation, we will:

• ensure sickle cell children receive all required vaccines

• provide additional pneumococcal and meningococcal protection

Thank you for giving our children the chance to live pain-free lives

Hello, 

Neglect and abandonment is one of the fastest killers of sickle cell children. It creeps in through poverty, broken families and the difficult choices parents must make. 

Dorcas is one of our early beneficiaries. She and her younger brother both live with sickle cell disease. Their father abandoned the family years ago, leaving their mother who is a rural schoolteacher, to raise them alone.

Dorcas’s doctors prescribed hydroxyurea, but her mother simply cannot afford it. The medication costs nearly half of her monthly salary, and with two children needing it, she has resigned herself to fate.

Dorcas and her brother have been enduring frequent pain crises, repeated hospitalizations, and emergency blood transfusions, each one more expensive than hydroxyurea. They always resorted to begging to pay for these blood transfusions and hospitalization. 

Your support can help us ensure Dorcas and children like her receive hydroxyurea regularly preventing crises, reducing hospital visits, and sparing families from the desperation of begging for blood.

Thank you for standing with Dorcas and children like her

Links:

• The Untold Stories of Sickle Cell Disease - Faith