History has been made at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (Ridge Hospital) as the first patient underwent the first-ever bone marrow transplant procedure in Ghana at the Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) centre in June 2018.
The centre serves persons living with sickle cell disease (SCD), otherwise known as sickle cell anaemia.
According to the Director of Administration at BMT Ghana, Dr Wisdom Erasmus Boatri, this could be a breakthrough for the medical profession since it was the first of its kind in the sub-region.
He told The Mirror that when successful, it would change the sickling statuses of SCD patients to either sickling negative patients or sickling carrier patients.
BMT or Blood Stem Cell Transplant is a procedure that replaces the unhealthy blood-forming cells in SCD patients with healthy ones.
It is by far the only known cure for SCD and is mostly used to treat patients with severe SCD in Europe and other parts of the world.
(edited)
