CARIBBEAN | The Cure They Can’t Reach: Sickle Cell, Race and the US$2.2 Million Question

A disease born of slavery’s genetic legacy now has a functional cure — at US$2.2 million per patient, available almost exclusively in wealthy countries. But Cuba built a comprehensive care model four decades ago that CARICOM nations could adopt tomorrow. The question is whether anyone will.

Calvin G. Brown | Health & Equity | WiredJa |

There is a disease that killed an estimated 81,000 children under the age of five in 2021, making it the 12th-leading cause of death among the world’s youngest children, according to the Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet Haematology. It was one of the first conditions in medical history to be understood at the molecular level — in 1949, four years before Watson and Crick described the double helix. More than half a million babies are born with it every year, overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa, India and the Caribbean.