Sickle cell anemia is generally associated with sub-Saharan Africans or those descended from them. However, this was not always understood. The study published by Juliana Manzoni Cavalcanti, a PhD student in the History of the Sciences and of Health graduate program, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, and Prof. Marcos Chor Maio, a professor and researcher in the program, shows that the first Brazilian biomedical studies of sickle cell anemia sought to identify if there was a direct link between race and the disease.
Most Brazilian physicians and scientists arrived at the conclusion that sickle cell anemia was due to miscegenation in Brazil. In Brazil, the disease began to be studied in the 1930s and 1940s and research focused on symptoms, diagnostic techniques and prevention methods. Most of the studies, however, were guided by the racial classification of the individuals diagnosed with sickle cell anemia.
Interest in the link between the disease and race was so intense that some researchers investigated sickle cell anemia in indigenous populations in order to determine if the disease was particular to Africans. Indigenous tribes were the only groups living far from population centers and thus free of miscegenation. This allowed researchers the possibility of discovering if sickle cell anemia appeared only in Africans or if it was a disease common to all races. Ernani Martins da Silva, a hematologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, is highlighted in the study. He traveled to rural areas in Brazil to search for sickle cells in the blood of indigenous people and his work was published in the American journal Science in 1948.
Sickle cell anemia became important beginning in the middle of the 1990s as a genetic disease specific to the Brazilian population of African descent and legitimized the adoption of policies based on race in the area of Brazilian public health. The lack of historical studies of the disease in Brazil was the motivation for this project, which attempted to show how the link between sickle cell anemia and Africans arose in the first scientific studies published in Brazil.
