Pediatric Disease Expert
His baby’s medical diagnosis changed the trajectory of his life and career. He couldn’t save everyone diagnosed with the disease passed down through his family, but his efforts improved the lives of many children world-wide.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
KO was born in eastern Ghana, on the continent of Africa. His father was a cocoa farmer. His mother was a homemaker.
EARLY CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF AN ADULT CAREER
KO was smart, studied hard at his schoolwork and excelled in playing athletic games with his classmates. He learned about America and wanted to go there to attend better schools and see where that might lead.
EDUCATION
KO persuaded his parents to send him to live with relatives in the U.S., where he earned a scholarship to a private school, followed by admission to an Ivy League school, where he majored in biology with the goal of becoming a medical doctor and one day returning to improve the health conditions in his native Africa.
Having worked hard during his four college years at Yale, when he was also captain of the track and field team, setting indoor and outdoor records in the high hurdles, KO was admitted to Yale’s medical school.
While attending one of many medical school lectures about how to diagnose rare diseases, KO first learned about ‘sickle cell disease’. As he sat listening, KO recognized the disease: it was in his family but had gone undiagnosed. One of his cousins had the symptoms and died at age 14.
“He was in pain,” said KO about his cousin. “His eyes were very yellow, and he was very skinny.”
KO wondered what might have been done to ease his cousin’s pain and extend his life, had better medical care been available in Africa. During his medical residency following medical school graduation, KO studied pediatric hematology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (“CHOP”), before moving to the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, where he was associate professor of pediatrics.
CAREER PATH INFLUENCED BY FAMILY INTEREST
Soon after their first child, a son, was born, KO’s wife recalls him coming upstairs to tell her, with tears in his eyes, ‘Our son, Kwame, has sickle cell disease.’ “My husband knew from his experience with his cousin and with his medical training, what that could mean: searing pain, organ damage, strokes, susceptibility to infections and premature death.”
Dr. KO then called his mother at their family home in Ghana. “God is telling you something,” she told him. ‘The message,’ she said, ‘is to use your medical training to help combat the disease.’ And that is what he did, until he drew his last breath,” said KO’s wife.
(Editor – Per Wikipedia: Sickle cell disease is a group of blood disorders typically inherited. It results in an abnormality in the oxygen carrying protein found in red blood cells, which leads to rigid, sickle-like shape under certain circumstances. Problems usually begin around 5 – 6 months of age, including pain, anemia, swelling in the hands and feet, bacterial infections, and stroke. The average life expectancy in the developed world is 40 to 60 years.)
In his six years at Tulane’s medical school, KO established the Tulane Sickle Cell Center of Southern Louisiana, a medical care facility, and helped the state health department develop a newborn-screening program for the disease.
He then returned to Children’s Hospital and remained there for 30 years, before leaving to work full-time in Ghana, at the Kumasi Center for Sickle Cell Disease, a research and treatment center. “He was very aware of the limitations of working in Africa,” his wife said. “His goal was to raise the standards of care.” He said, ‘It can be done in America, and that is our goal here.’
At CHOP, KO established the hospital’s Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. He was also a leader of a large federally funded study, the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, that helped answer an important question: What is the natural course of the disease? Analyzing the study’s data, KO found that the disease could result in blockages in blood vessels in the brain, leading to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cells. That led other researchers to be able to predict which children were most at risk, and to discover that regular transfusions could prevent most strokes in those children.
MEDICAL CAREER CHALLENGE – UNABLE TO SAVE EVERY PATIENT
Despite the progress that KO and others had made in caring for people with sickle cell disease, his son, Kwame, did not survive it. He died at age 40, the father of two young children.
(Editor – Hopefully medical professionals, though unable to cure every disease for every patient, can take some solace in having helped patients to cope with their symptoms and extend their lives with some degree of comfort.)
CAREER SATISFACTION
Honors and accolades for KO’s medical research and patient care were many, including from Ghana and in the United States, where KO received the Assistant Secretary of Health Exceptional Service Medal, the highest civilian award given by the Public Health Service. The American Society for Hematology honored him with its Stratton Award for Translational and Clinical Science.
Aside from those honors, colleagues of KO noted that he had indeed significantly improved the lives of many children through his research and advocacy.
