{"doi":"10.1093/jscdis/yoaf034","title":"Letter to the editor regarding a global overview of sickle cell disease: populations, policy limitations and urgent need for comprehensive SCD clinical care, a systematic review","abstract":"A Global Overview of Sickle Cell Disease: Populations, Policy limitations and urgent need for comprehensive SCD clinical care, A Systematic Review,\" 1 Joseph et al comprehensively report the status of sickle cell disease (SCD) worldwide and offer a plan to advance the field and correct SCD's long history of neglect.This is important work, as the SCD landscape outside the United States has traditionally been underrepresented in scientific literature and public discourse.The history of SCD is intrinsically linked to broader struggles for equity and human rights.In the United States, the seminal book by Keith Wailoo, To Die in the City of Blues (2001), 2 remains a poignant reminder of how SCD epitomized the fight for justice by exposing racial inequities in health care, the politics of federal funding, and the stigmatization of Black communities.Yet, as one broadens the horizon to SCD worldwide, the universality of these themes emerges clearly.Across continents, individuals living with SCD often find themselves at the bottom of social hierarchies.In Africa, where the disease burden is greatest, most children with SCD are either invisible to the health care system as they die before diagnosis or live under stigmasometimes ascribed to myths such as ogbanje, which portray affected children and families as cursed.In Europe, SCD disproportionately affects migrants from Africa who already face marginalization and limited access to social support.In South Asia, SCD is most common among Scheduled Tribes and other impoverished groups living in the so-called \"sickle belt.\"The most obvious result of SCD's neglect is its unacceptably high mortality in the 21 st century.In sub-Saharan Africa, SCD remains one of the leading causes of under-5 mortality and in the United States where universal newborn screening (NBS) has been in place for decades-adult mortality remains poor.The unfavorable comparison Joseph et al 1 make between SCD and cystic fibrosis (CF) is corroborated by mortality trends in the 2 diseases: a 10-fold funding differential has resulted in dramatic survival gains in CF, with mean age of","journal":"Journal of sickle cell disease.","year":2025,"id":559267,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9365,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":379109,"name":"Enrico M. Novelli","orcid":"0000-0003-3010-8285","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":5,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:55:34.849815Z","pmid":"41080703","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}