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Imagine Having A Cut On Your Index Finger That Starts To

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Imagine having a cut on your index finger that starts to bleed. A minor cut, so you think nothing of it. You instinctively put the finger in your mouth, pressing the area with your tongue and teeth in an attempt to stop the bleeding. That fails, so you walk to the bathroom sink, turn the cold-water knob, and place the blood-smeared finger under cool running water. Finally, that does the trick. Slap a Band-Aid on it and you’re good to go, doing whatever you were doing before. This time, imagine the dripping of blood doesn’t stop. That horror is what hemophiliacs have to be cautious of. Hemophilia is a rare blood disease that interferes with the body’s ability to create protein-clotting factors, which is a special protein that is essential …show more content…

Signs and symptoms differ, varying with the kind of severity a patient has. Episodic bleeding is the most prominent symptom. Patients with mild severity usually only experience uncontrollable bleeding after physical trauma or surgery. Individuals with severe hemophilia suffer from frequent and sometimes spontaneous bleeds, ranging from nosebleeds to deep internal bleeding. This must treated immediately due to the possibility of permanent tissue damage or deformity of joints. Other symptoms individuals may experience are extreme fatigue, double vision, low blood pressure, blood in urine and stool, swelling of the joints, along with much more. In the United States, Hemophilia is usually diagnosed in children as early as 36 months post birth for the mild form. It only takes 8 months to diagnose children with moderate hemophilia after birth and 1 month to diagnose severe cases. A simple blood test is the key to a diagnosis of the illness. Prenatal screening can also be used as a method of diagnosis, but comes with risks. As prominent as hemophilia appears to be, it is in fact, a rare disease. Roughly, 400 infants per year are born with the blood illness. Approximately 20,000 individuals in the U.S. have hemophilia and about 400,000 worldwide. That number lacks drastically in comparison to malaria and sickle cell anemia. There is one thing it has in common with sickle cell anemia and that is how it’s acquired.

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