September is marked every year in the world as sickle cell anemia month to draw attention to a group of blood disorders children inherit from their parents. The problems of people with the disease which begins when babies are five to six months old are severe pain, swelling in the hands and feet, bacterial infections and stroke.

Sickle cell crisis or attack is set off by temperature changes, stress dehydration or high altitude. While the life expectancy for sickle cell patients in the developed countries is 40 to 60 years and less in the developing or underdeveloped nations in Africa and other continents.

Like diabetes, a disease caused by high sugar in the blood, sickle cell anemia is an ailment modern doctors have not found cure for, except for a small percentage of people who can be healed by a transplant of bone marrow cells.

But for most sufferers of the disease, orthodox medical practitioners can only manage it with infection prevention vaccination and antibiotics, high fluid intake, folic acid supplementation and pain medication. Or blood transfusion or what is called mediation hydroxycarbamide (hydroxyurea)

But a 77-year-old Ijebu-Ode-born and based auto-engineer who schooled and worked in Germany for more than a decade before returning home, told me recently that he had been curing people of sickle cell anemia in the last fifteen years. He said they were patients referred to him from different parts of the South-West, England and the United States.

He too did not know that sickle cell was curable until one herbalist healed his daughter of the disease. It was from the man he learned how to get rid of the disorder.

I am not revealing his name now because I only promote herbalists after I know someone they had cured or who my relatives, friends and other credible people recommended to me. Consequently, I told the herbalist I can only write about him if he cures three readers of this column who have sickle cell anemia that I would send to him for free treatment.

He agreed to my proposal, but said such people would need to travel to Ijebu-Ode to collect the medicine from him. So any sickler reading this or anyone who knows one should call me for the man’s telephone number. It is when at least two of the patients attest to being cured that I will write about the herbalist.

Facts obtained online showed that 25% of Nigeria’s population of 112 million have sickle cell trait (known as AS), while the Hemoglobin C (Hb C) trait is largely confined to people in the South-West where it occurs in about six percent.

In 2015, there were four million four hunfred thousand sicklers in the world, while forty-three million others had sickle cell trait. In the first sentence, the disease was described as a group of blood disorder. One with sickle cell trait is therefore a person with a single abnormal copy who does not usually have symptoms. About 80 percent of sicklers are believed to be in sub-Saharan Africa.

But  the disease is also said to occur relatively frequently in parts of India, the Arabian Peninsula, and among people of African origin living other parts of the world, that is in Europe, United States, Canada, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand.

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Globally, the disease in 2015 killed one hundred and fourteen thousand, eight hundred people.

Goodbye Pa Giwa, the legendary herbalist (1925 – 2019)

Pa Aliyu Giwa of Adavieba, a village near Okene in Kogi State, whom I featured in this column from January 3 – 17, last year, is no doubt the most successful and best celebrated herbalist in the history of Nigeria (1914 – 2019). At 94, he was also the doyen of alternative medicine in the country.

He came to national attention in 2017 when the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, visited him in his village to thank him for curing a traditional ruler in Abia State of prostate cancer. This was after the monarch underwent two unsuccessful surgical operations in a modern hospital, carried out by orthodox doctors.

On the occasion, Dr. Onu pledged that the Federal Government would give him a car and build a four-bedroom bungalow for him in his village. The promise was fulfilled a few months later. The car he was given was a brand new Kia Sports Utility Vehicle.

His grandson, Mr. Yakubu Adezia, who helped him to prepare the medicine and sent them out to Pa Giwa’s patients in different parts of the country, said about one thousand and seventy-four patients reached out to the old man.

The figure was such because the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and African Independent Television (AIT) did programmes about him. But I made about one hundred of the patients available to him through this column.

Pa Giwa charged N25, 000 to cure a patient. It was the lowest fee of the three herbalists I wrote about from 2015 – 2018. Mrs. Olusola Folarin charged N100, 000 for prostate enlargement and N150, 000 for cancerous gland. The third herbalist, Dr. Adeola Isaac Odeyemi Ph.D Computer Science, charged fifty and eighty thousand naira respectively. Orthodox doctors charge one hundred thousand naira to one or two million naira depending on the town or city of location of the patient.

Although Yakubu has been operating in the background, he had been the backbone of Pa Giwa’s medicine in the last 15 years. But to prove his mettle so that the readers of this column can have confidence in him, he has agreed to treat three people with prostate cancer free of charge. Anyone interested should contact me for his phone number.

May the soul of Pa Giwa who went to  glory last week Tuesday, October 1, the day of our independence anniversary rest in peace. May the good Lord also forgive him his sins and make him have a place in His Kingdom.