Hemophilia and its impact on our society
1Hemophilia is a rare inherited bleeding disorder in which the blood does not clot normally. Hemophiliacs do not bleed more extensively or even more quickly than other people, but they do bleed for a longer time after an injury or a surgery. Bleeding may oc-cur internally especially in the knees, ankles, elbows and into tissues and muscles. If it is left untreated then the internal bleeding into joints and muscles will cause agonizing pain and severe crippling. It can be very fatal when bleeding occurs in a vital organ for exam-ple the brain. Fundamentally the people who are affected by hemophilia blood have little to none of a specific protein that is necessary for normal clotting. 2There are two types of hemophilia, which are A, and B. Hemophiliacs A, lack of protein which is known as factor 8 (viii) . While people with hemophilia B, are missing or have very
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Hemophilia is not a disease that can be caught from someone else like a virus. The gene that contains the instructions to make factor 8(viii) and 9(ix) properly, which exist in the X chromosome. Due to that reason, since the DNA of males only contains one X chromosome, hemophilia mostly affects males. Women have two X chromosomes, hence even if the defective gene is present in one of them , the other x chromosome has the required information in order to create clotting factors. A female can also has hemophilia due to the inactive X chromosome. 4There are possi-bilities for one of the X chromosome to not to express itself. If the X chromosome with hemophilia gene is the active chromosome, then the female will have lower levels. It is said that 50% of carriers meaning that when she is not affected, but she could pass on hemophilia to her son have factor levels that are