Sickle cell patients send SOS BuharI as they decry death of 170 patients in three years

                                                      
SOUTH East Coordinator of the Association of People Living with Sickle Cell Disorder (APLSCD), Edward Aisha has cried out over stigmatization, negligence and deprivation of right of participation of children living with Sickle Cell Anaemia, saying that such give rise to indiscriminate cause of their death.
  Mrs Aisha, a Sickle cell carrier, regretted that federal and states governments had no plan for sicklers especially in providing them with jobs and subsidizing their drugs for the management of their health challenges.
  She maintained that if federal government should invest heavily as it did during Ebola cases in Nigeria, the challenges of sickle cell would be well managed and the carriers would live  long and happy lives.
  “Government should come to our aid. Some Sicklers are dying in silence because of lack of fund to manage their health crises. Where a sickler spends more than N40,000 in a month to sustain his or her life and some of them have no means of income as the society has condemned them. In the last three years, over 170 patients have died because of rejection from the society.”
  Weeping while addressing pressmen in Awka, Anambra State, the Coordinator condemned in strong terms some hoodlums who have established foundations and agencies extorting money from international communities in the name of helping them.
  Aisha who was also a military officer in Nigerian Army, alleged that some clergies wed young guys and girls who are both “AS”, thereby subjecting their future children to perpetual sufferings.
  She commended Anambra State government for being supportive, adding that Anambra was the only State to pass Sickle Cell Bill in 2002,though it has not been implemented.
  While urging all to join hands in disseminating information on Sickle Cell, she extolled the MTN Company for donating one minute call to the Sickle Cell Foundation.
  In another development, the Sickle Cell Foundation in an SOS to President Mohammadu Buhari demanded to be treated equally like every other citizen.
  “We the above named organization made up of those cell patients who are tired of hiding our identities for fear of victimization, who are tired to watching a most dastardly, most wicked, most evil act being perpetuating and worn out of being used as lab rats by ill-intentioned laboratory scientists and egotistical, self deluded, fraudulent religious leaders, hereby, with the last strength we can summon from this living hell of a soma volitionally given to us by our parents in the name of love, raise a petition against all the nongovernmental organizations claiming to exist and function in the name of sickle cell disorder and the patients, chief among them sickle cell foundation, and declare that they have been causing us pains-emotional and psychological, and that they are fraudulent and imposters.
  We hereby denounce any association with these foundations and demand they be, with immediate effect, forestalled from representing us as they never were. We demand for the thorough probe of the activities of Sickle Cell Foundation, Nigeria and every other foundation having the nomenclature 'Sickle Cell' attached to it.
  We the real sufferers of sickle cell anemia declare these nongovernmental organizations our primary enemies as they have been the eclipse blocking the rays from well meaning people all over the world and the government from getting to us and the cause of cessation of production of sickle cell babies – the height of man's inhumanity to his fellow man. These foundations are the reason we still have many frustrated sickle cell patient who live a life of hiding in the shadows, pill popping self pity and drug addiction.