Campaign starts nationwide to lobby for healthy marriage

Health authorities in Kingdom have intensified a campaign advocating healthy marriages in a bid to create awareness about genetic diseases.

In Saudi Arabia, one main factor contributing to the spread of genetic diseases is the high rate of consanguineous marriages, as nearly half of Saudi citizens preferring to tie the knot with their cousins. As a result, hereditary blood diseases become prevalent in the Kingdom, a major health concern in the country.

Saudi Arabia has made premarital screening and genetic risk assessment mandatory a long time ago, hoping that if a couple found out they were at high risk of passing on a hereditary disease to their offspring, they would reevaluate their match.

Thousands of couples have called off marriages after finding they were genetically mismatch. Yet, some prospective couples are willing to take the risk even when they test positive, according to experts.

The Ministry of Health marks Feb. 21 every year as an awareness day on genetic diseases resulting from marriages. A new awareness campaign that will last for a month was launched across the Kingdom on Thursday. The campaign focused upon genetic disorders and aims to reduce the spread of genetically transmitted diseases as a result of mismatched marriages.

Launching the program formally at King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah, Dr. Abdul Rahman Baksh, the hospital’s director, said having premarital screening test would pave way for the ideal marriage and healthy offspring in future.

He added that premarital screening and genetic counseling advisory is available at hospitals across the Kingdom free of cost.

Dr. Baksh also said campaign would contribute to reduce the burden on hospitals from genetically transmitted diseases.

There has been an increase in the Kingdom of autosomal recessive genetic diseases that only appear when a child receives a faulty pair of a particular from both parents. It is a recessive gene and it manifests as an illness only if the child has inherited the abnormal gene from both parents.

Both parents may be healthy, but they both carry the abnormal gene and could pass it on to their offspring. Genetic screening is the only way of knowing if the parents are carriers or not.