One man’s mission to help sickle cell patients

Mr Oracha showing a copy of his registration

At only two years old, baby Moses was misdiagnosed with malaria. It was one of the lowest moments in his family’s life after they were left with little choice but to watch their little one pop pill after pill.

In the nine years that followed, Moses was in and out of hospital so many times that he views the brightly lit St Elizabeth Lwak Mission Hospital’s wards as his second home.

“Moses was our regular client since he would be admitted in our health facility almost every week,” says Consolata Oluoch, a nursing officer at the hospital.

In the beginning, whenever Moses was in pain, he would be rushed to the hospitals for treatment and the doctors would misdiagnose him.

The young man has thus spent a great deal of his life not only fighting sickle cell anaemia, but also popping drugs for ailments he did not have. Malaria, for instance, seemed the doctors’ easiest excuse to send him to the pharmacy.

Sadly for Moses, pain was not his only headache. He was constantly taunted by his schoolmates and some relatives. The stigma was often worse than the pain, he says, and at one point he was tempted to drop out school.

“A child succumbed to the disease and everyone in the village knew that he and my son were suffering from the same disease and so when he died, they repeatedly reminded me that my son would be next. I could not handle it anymore and had to look for a solution,” his father Martin Oracha recalls.

Wondering why their son was always being afflicted with malaria, Moses’ parents decided to seek help further up the medical chain, and that was when their son, who is now in Form three, was diagnosed with sickle cell disease.

Determined to save his son’s life, Oracha — a primary school teacher, decided to research on the disease and see how best to manage it.

“After reading a lot of sickle cell anaemia related books, I realised the disease had no cure. The use of traditional medicine came into my mind and I started consulting with elders in my village on the way forward and that is how Martinoscam came about,” he says.

Today, Moses — who wants to be a neurosurgeon — has outlived the villager’s taunts to celebrate his sixteenth birthday earlier this year all thanks to the herbal remedy.

Quinter Achieng, another victim of the disease, can now look forward to her seventeeth birthday courtesy of Martinoscam. For a person who has lived with sickle cell disease, this will be a major milestone because most victims die young.

But, like Moses, Quinter has paid a high price for her condition, not least being in and out of school.

“My daughter’s condition was something I was giving up on. I even vowed never to give birth again for fear of giving birth to a child with the same condition,” says Debra Onyango, Quinter’s mother.

According to Oracha, who is also a member of Siaya County sickle cell foundation, Martinoscam — which is a product of assorted herbal plants, helps in enhancing growth, improving immunity and clears pot belly.

“It is administered in liquid form, twice a day for six months. Children take quarter of a glass while adults take a full glass,” he explains.

In most cases, those with sickle cell disease need blood transfusion to prevent complications related to the disease. Oracha says his herbal remedy has the ability to boost blood for sickle cell anaemia patients which therefore reduces need for blood transfusion.

When we visited Oracha’s ‘clinic’ located in his home at Memba, Siaya County, we found Debra among tens of guests who regularly throng the teacher’s home to get a dose of the herbal ‘cure’ for sickle cell anaemia.

“I cannot conduct diagnosis and therefore require one to first go to hospital. We only administer Martinoscam to the patient upon referral by a medical practitioner,” Oracha says noting that the medicine is consumed hand in hand with folic acid and anti-malarial drug.

He says after treating the patient in his ‘clinic’, he monitors them on a monthly basis. He has an admission book which has his clients’ contacts and records.

Oracha, who now works closely with medical practitioners, says the medicine was registered in 2013 under the Ministry of Culture. He reveals he has since been approached by Kenya Medical Research Institute to help in management of the disease in Siaya county by widely availing the herbal drug.

St Elizabeth Lwak Mission Hospital is one of the facilities that Oracha works with and Oluoch confirms there has been some definite changes. “Since we incorporated Martinoscam in the management of sickle cell conditions among patients at the facility, in the last one year, the crisis admission rate has dropped from 60 per cent to less than 2 per cent and the sickle cell anemia wards are often empty,” she says.

Oracha’s work has, however, not been without its challenges.

“In spite of the positive steps I have made in my ten-year research, I still face a few challenges such as availability of tap water to make the medicine,” he says adding that Government can also come in and make the medicine in syrup and tablet form for easy accessibility to patients.

Despite the disease’s prevalence, Oracha is concerned by the lack of blood banks and sickle cell testing equipment in most parts of the county which makes it very difficult to curb the disease.

According to Boniface Leo, a medic at the mission hospital, diagnosis of sickle cell anaemia varies from one individual to another due to differences in the blood composition of individuals.

“Blood has a lot of elements - one of them being globin which we refer to as chains, in simple terms. During conception, both parents contribute these chains that form composition of the haemoglobin (an iron-containing protein in blood that carries oxygen from the lungs to body tissues), an alpha chain and a beta chain,” he explains.

Leo says there is formation of a third chain called the foetal chain, found in infants. A beta chain, responsible for the sickle cell trait at times, is usually suppressed by foetal chains which some children retain years after being born, making it difficult to detect the condition.

He says when red blood cells are malformed, the person could be either a carrier of the disease or a victim, depending on degree of the malformation.

“In extreme cases, where the patient is not just a carrier but a victim, the red blood cells turn crescent shaped, making them stiff and fragile, hence clogging the blood vessels, especially around the joints, and depriving the body of oxygen. This causes pain. A normal red blood cell has a life span of about 120 days while a sickle cell has between 10-20 days,” he says.

According to the World Health Organisation, approximately five per cent of the world’s population carries trait genes for haemoglobin disorders. These are genetic blood diseases due to inheritance of mutant haemoglobin genes from both, generally healthy, parents.

Over 300 000 babies with severe haemoglobin disorders are born each year.