Adventist boy named national sickle cell poster child

[Jerry D Thomas]

Gabriel George, an eight year-old member of the Austin Alpha Seventh-day Adventist Church in Austin, Tex., has been named the 2007-2009 national poster child for the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America.

Gabriel, who was diagnosed with sickle cell disease when he was just three weeks old, is in the third grade at Applegate Adventist Junior Academy in Round Rock, Tex. Otherwise a very healthy and active young man, he traveled to Kenya on a mission trip in the summer of 2007 where he helped raise more than $13,000 for an orphanage. “God has blessed us,” says his mother, Shelly George. “He has fewer health problems than most other children with sickle cell disease. I believe it is God’s plan to have Gabriel help tell others about the disease and raise money for research to find a cure.”

Sickle cell anemia is an inherited disease, most common among people of African descent. With sickle cell, defective hemoglobin molecules cluster together and cause red blood cells to assume a sickle shape. The distortion keeps the cells from squeezing through small blood vessels. This causes blockages that deprive organs and tissue of oxygen-carrying blood, which can produce severe pain and damage tissues and organs. According to the American Sickle Cell Anemia Association, Gabriel is one of approximately 72,000 people in the United States who have the illness. It occurs in about one out of every 500 African American births and one in every 900 Hispanic American births.

Gabriel has been the spokeschild for the Marc Thomas Sickle Cell Foundation and the Blood & Tissue Center of Central Texas since he was two years old and has done regular speaking engagements on behalf of both groups. As the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America’s national poster child, Gabriel will be in Washington, D.C. for their national convention on September 16 – 22, where he is scheduled to speak before the hundreds of attendees and to meet personally with President George Bush.

The Austin American-Statesman did a story on Gabriel which you can read here: Gabriel George