ACTUALITÉS

This Indian Couple Had a Baby Just To Save Their Terminally Ill Son

India has 40 million carriers of thalassemia. 100,000 out of that die before they turn 20 due to lack of access to treatment. Photo via Unsplash Sahdev Singh Solanki, a resident of Ahmedabad, the largest city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, remembers the last seven years very clearly. “Our lives only revolved around our son,” the 37-year-old government employee, told VICE News. Solanki’s son, Abhijeet, is seven years old. He was born with thalassemia major, a genetic disorder which leads to low haemoglobin count in the blood. One life-saving treatment is constant blood transfusions.  Up until February this year, Abhijeet had received up to 80 blood transfusions since he was born. “This is a genetic disorder, and of a rare kind. It has no straight treatment,” said Solanki. “We mostly got blood transfusions through donors and blood banks, just to maintain his routine life.”  The other option—and a life-altering one—was a bone marrow transplant. The family’s bone marrow, including that of Abhijeet’s older sister, did not match. In 2017, Solanki came across the “saviour sibling” experiment—a baby created to be a donor of organs, bone marrow or cells to the elder sibling.  “Without the bone marrow transplant, the son’s life expectancy, even with the blood transfusions, was 25-30 years,” Manish Banker, medical director at Nova IVF Fertility in Ahmedabad, told VICE News. Three years ago, when the Solankis approached Banker for what they call India’s first “saviour sibling” treatment, Banker came on board.  “This is the first such instance in India,” said Banker.  India has 40 million carriers of thalassemia, out of which 100,000 die before they turn 20 due to lack of access to treatment. Thalassemia major is the most severe form of the disease, which occurs when a child inherits two mutated genes, one from each parent….