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Gulu, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Medical professionals at St Mary’s Hospital Lacor in Gulu City have urged parents to embrace mandatory sickle cell screening for newborns as part of an effort to tackle the rising burden of Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) among children.
The call, according to medics, would ensure that every child born in the hospital is screened for sickle cell disease before discharge, allowing for early diagnosis and timely medical intervention before symptoms turn severe.
Dr Venice Omona, the Hospital’s Deputy Medical Director, noted that with the spike in sickle cell disease among children, the hospital is scaling its screening programmes to promote early diagnosis among children.
Dr Omona explained that early detection of the disease in children enables medics to start providing medical care at an early stage, which helps to reduce risks of severe complications, and ultimately leads to improved quality of life.
The call for early screening comes at a time the hospital has registered what it describes as an increase in sickle cell cases in children who have been diagnosed after presenting with symptoms of the disease.
According to data provided from the hospital following sickle cell screening conducted between July 2024 up to June this year, out of 3,167 tested (74 percent female), a total of 792 (25 percent) tested positive for sickle cell disease.
During the same period, a total of 890 children under 13 years and below, 266 (29.9 percent) tested positive for the disease.
Dr Omona, however, observed that the data from the screening highlights a sickle cell positivity rate at 25, which he says is alarming. He particularly pointed out a worrying trend of low sickle cell screening among couples, especially men, a move he says contributes to the growing burden of the disease in children.
Currently, Lacor Hospital has a total of 981 active sickle cell patients on its database at the sickle cell clinic. However, out of this total, 482 patents are on hydroxyurea, a lifesaving medicine for sickle cell patients.
But according to Dr Martin Ogwang, Lacor Hospital Institutional Director, the cost of hyroxyurea remains a burden for many sickle cell patients, including the hospital, which subsidises patients’ medical bills.
Dr Ogwang noted that the hospital annually spends an estimated 1 billion shillings on providing essential medicine to the more than 2,000 sickle cell patients at the facility, amidst limited funding from the government. The hospital’s patients’ fees, however, collection for the 2023/24 Financial year was only 7.1 billion shillings.
For instance, daily, a sickle cell patient incurs about 1,500 shillings for the daily uptake of hydroxyurea, accounting for about 45,000 shillings monthly, an amount majority of families can’t afford.
Dr Ogwang appealed to the government to consider increasing the 58 million shillings’ quarterly allocation for the primary health care budget the hospital receives, to enable the purchase of essential medicines and medical supplies.
Dr Daniel Ojok, the Deputy Medical Director of Community Health Services at the Hospital, emphasised the need for couples to carry out premarital sickle cell screening to determine whether they are sickle cell carriers or not.
He notes that while most people prioritise HIV/Aids testing before marriage or even planning to have children, premarital sickle cell screening is important since it helps reduce the chances of carrier couples producing children with sickle cell.
Acholi Sub-region remains one of the areas in the country with a high burden of sickle cell disease, with records indicating up to 9,788 cases registered from January 2024 to February 2025. At Gulu Regional Referral Hospital, data shows that some 2,055 sickle cell anaemic children were registered in the same period.
In Uganda, the Health Ministry estimates that about 20,000 children each year are born with Sickle Cell Disease, a hereditary health condition which causes red blood cells to become sickle-shaped. If undetected early, a patient could develop severe complications
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