Safe Marriage and Sperm Immobilization for Prevention of GeneticallyInherited Disease

Abstract

Genetic diseases devastate the society. Out of 9 million birth defects 7.9 are due to genetic causes. Management of most of the inherited disorders are very expensive and not affordable to majority. Early detection and lifelong therapy is mandatory. Palliative nature of the treatments available prolongs lives resulting in accumulation of cases and cost escalation. Therefore prevention is mandatory where the main focus would be detection of carriers of the defective genes. However most of the prevention methods available are not readily accessible or not acceptable due to inevitable financial constrains or self-imposed social cultural and religious reasons to majority. Therefore exploration of innovative approaches that goes beyond traditional recommendations is worthy considerations. “Safe marriage; avoidance of marriage between carriers by ensuring one of the partner in a couple to be a non-carrier suggest a practical no cost approach of prevention of recessively inherited disorders. The vision of safe marriage can extend to safe conception. For a safe marriage a non-carrier is selected from the society, for a safe conception a heterozygote father could provide millions of healthy sperms to be selected for conception. The author suggests using the advances of genetic sciences to explore the possibilities of selecting healthy sperms of immobilizing defective sperms and developing a vaginal jelly so that prevention of recessively inherited diseases becomes practical.