Death by Paper Cut: is it possible?
Imagine this. You are running on the street and you fall, scraping your leg. Ordinarily, after an hour of pain, you would put a bandaid on it and move on with your day, because your blood would clot and the bleeding would stop. But imagine the bleeding didn’t stop. There was no clot, and you kept bleeding out from your little wound. Hemophilia is a blood disorder in which the blood doesn’t clot. People with Hemophilia have to deal with simple cuts bleeding for much longer than usual, as well as frequent internal bleeding into joints and organs.
Our blood is made up of a solid part, and a liquid part (plasma). The solid part is made up of red blood cells which transport oxygen, white cells which help fight infection, and platelets which help coagulation. The plasma is made up of proteins, salts, sugars and water. Fourteen different proteins are responsible for clotting and are known as clotting factors. Hemophilia occurs from a change or deficiency in these clotting factors.
The word “hemophilia” comes from the greek word for blood, haima, and philia, meaning affection. An interesting fact about Hemophilia is that almost everyone with Hemophilia is a male, because it is inherited on the X chromosome, which males only have 1 and females have 2. If a female has one normal X and an X with Hemophilia, they still won’t have the disorder as it is inherited in a recessive manner.
Another fun fact its that Hemophilia is called the Royal Disease because Queen Victoria of England was a carrier of the disease and passed it along to three of her nine children. Two of her daughters then passed it along to their children who married into the royal families of Russia, Spain, and Germany. It is speculated that treatment for hemophilia would not have advanced as quickly were it not for the royal princes who suffered from the condition!
In the early 1980s, during the HIV epidemic, majority of hemophiliacs died from HIV. This is because to treat the hemophilia, they would receive blood product transfusions from donors. This was at a time when HIV wasn’t well known, so there were no tests prior to the blood being given to these patients. Thankfully, with modern medicine hemophiliacs can get treated with artificially created products or blood products that can be tested for HIV.
The good news is that in most cases, people with Hemophilia live long and nearly healthy lives with treatment. Only in severe cases does Hemophilia prevent someone from living a mostly normal life. So next time you get a cut and see blood, be thankful you don’t have hemophilia!
