Favism Research Paper

778 Words4 Pages

Favism is a disorder. It’s caused by a lack of G6PD, and the lack of G6PD causes free radicals to roam free in your red blood cells, and therefore breaking them down and causing havoc in your blood. Unchecked, this could be a fatal problem. For example, primaquine, a medicine that helped regulate malaria, was deadly/ destructive to the healths of the people who had favism. That is because primaquine puts stress on your blood cells in order to make your blood a malaria-hostile area. However, when your blood cells can’t take the stress, the free radicals cause your cells to burst, or explode, destroying them. The reason why your cells can’t take the stress is because of lack of G6PD doesn’t throw out as much free radicals as it should. Therefore, after the primaquine applies stress on your blood cells. If this is untreated, then it can lead to severe weakness, kidney failure, heart failure, and most likely death. It was during the Korean war that people started noticing that people had reactions to fava beans. Because of the fact that malaria was common in …show more content…

Because of malaria being such a dangerous disease, evolution has valued the resistance to malaria that free radicals give, even though the free radicals can cause hemolytic anemia. Although hemolytic anemia can cause death from cells bursting and kidney or heart failure, this still isn’t as big of an issue to survival rather than malaria. Malaria causes you to be extremely weak, and it causes death a lot more frequently than anemia. Because of the stress that free radicals put on the bacteria that causes malaria, people with favism are more resistant to malaria. It has been shown in research that P. falciparum (the bacteria that causes malaria) prefers blood cells that do not have as many free radicals rather than blood cells that have G6PD deficiency. Also, children with G6PD deficiency are two times more resistant to malaria than children without