Research Article Prevalence of Deletional Alpha Thalassemia and Sickle Gene in a Tribal Dominated Malaria Endemic Area of Eastern India

Copyright © 2014 Prasanta Purohit et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Inherited hemoglobin disorders like alpha thalassemia and sickle gene are common in the Indian subcontinent. These disorders in the heterozygous state act as malaria resistance genes and influence the susceptibility to Plasmodium falciparummalaria. There is inadequate knowledge about the epidemiology of these malaria resistance genes in the tribal dominated malaria endemic region of the state of Odisha in eastern India. A cross sectional prevalence study was undertaken in 594 subjects in five tribal populations in this region, namely, Sahara (42.4%), Kutia Kandha (30.0%), Kuda (15.8%), Gond (9.8%), and Oraon (2.0%). Sickling test, Hb electrophoresis, HPLC, andmolecular studies were undertaken to diagnose the prevalence of sickle allele