Sickle Cell anaemia truly came as a result of nature's fight against Malaria about 7500 years ago, and it took place first in the rainforest of today's Cameroon before spreading across West Africa through Bantu migration.
The worrying aspect about Sicke Cell disease is that we should have eradicated it like 30 years ago through artificial selection of mates.
Animals, even animals have evolved their intelligence enough to know who to avoid during mating to protect their future offspring.
When it comes to mating, animals do not have any sentiments or emotional attachments to these things. They only mate with those whose genes would complement their own to give birth to very healthy offspring.
The knowledge of sickle cell has been in the public domain in the last 40 years, yet we never deployed that knowledge to our advantage in eradicating the disease.
Like Sickle Cell disease, same also with the prevalence of Kidney disease which was another nature fight mutation through the protein called APOL1, mostly carried by Blacks of West African ancestry, which researchers believe is responsible for the higher rate of kidney failure in Black Americans, more than three times higher than that for those of European ancestry.
While studying APOL1, researchers found that having just one copy of a G1 or G2 variant protects against a deadly form of African sleeping sickness. The global distribution of these APOL1 variants indicates that they probably originated and quickly spread in West Africa, where sleeping sickness is endemic.
With surveys showing that G1 and G2 account for around half of all APOL1 genes in Ghana and Nigeria, the current hypothesis is that roughly 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, the mutations leading to G1 and G2 occurred in West Africa — and spread rapidly in the region, though not so much elsewhere in the African continent, because they conferred immunity to sleeping sickness.
This is similar to the type of evolution that happened with the Sickle Cell to give carriers advantage over Malaria as having one disease-related version of a gene (for the blood protein beta-hemoglobin) protects against malaria but having two causes sickle cell disease.
Unfortunately, the huge price for overall protection against Malaria parasite, a fraction of a population gets two sickle cell variants and develops serious disease.
Thus in trying to solve one problem, nature disrupts the system and leaves it with another problem. The question now is, to what extent does nature denatures, breaking its own laws, and leaving us vulnerable?