Hon. Marie-Françoise Mégie: Dear colleagues, I was honoured to see so many of you this morning at the parliamentary sickle cell breakfast. Thank you.

This event, which is put on in collaboration with Senator Gerba and sponsored by the African Canadian Senate Group, gave us a chance to watch a preview of a documentary entitled Silent Suffering, which explores the grim reality facing people with sickle cell disease and their loved ones.

About one in 20 people on this planet carry the sickle cell gene. In some parts of the world, it is one in four. The disease is most common among people with ancestors from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

In Canada, about one in 2,500 children is born with the disease. Unfortunately, health care providers tend to have a poor understanding of the disease.

The shape of a healthy red blood cell is a biconcave disc. In people with sickle cell disease, red blood cells become rigid and stretch into a sickle shape, hence the name. A pin shaped like a hot pepper serves as a teaching tool for patients and an apt illustration: it burns, it hurts, and it causes suffering.

The most common symptoms of this disease are attacks of acute and chronic pain, or even a stroke, all at an early age. These painful attacks are so intense that they can only be relieved with narcotics, and they recur throughout the child’s life. In such cases, when these young people are admitted to a hospital where medical staff are not familiar with this disease, they often don’t get proper care because they’re labelled as drug addicts.

In the 1970s, people with this disease rarely lived beyond the age of 10. These days, many patients live into their sixties.

That’s why it’s so important to increase awareness of sickle cell disease, and of the importance of neonatal screening and the search for better treatments.

Gene therapy research in Canada is yielding very promising results for the treatment of this rare, hereditary disease. Hopefully the potential cure will be accessible to all sickle cell carriers worldwide.

Happy National Sickle Cell Awareness Day.

Thank you.

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