A 14-year-old kid from Bihar, Ali Hussain is afflicted by progeria, an extremely rare genetic disease characterised by rapid ageing. The disease is fatal and incurable.
Consequently, the young teenager is aging eight times faster and looks like a wizened old man of 110 years.
Progeria, which is reportedly known to affect just 80 people worldwide, ages the body so rapidly that sufferers succumb to the extraordinary disease before attaining their youth. Most victims die by the age of 14 with a heart attack or pneumonia.
Ali stated, “I very much want to live and I hope there is medicine for my condition out there. I’m not scared of death but my parents have suffered a lot.I’d love to live much longer for them. I don’t want to burden them with any more pain.”
Ali’s 5 siblings hit by progeria
In what can be termed as a tragic state of affairs, five of Ali’s siblings have already fallen prey to Progeria.
Ali’s parents, Nabi Hussain Khan, 50, and mum Razia, 46, are first ¬cousins had an arranged marriage 32 years ago. The couple had eight kids. Four, born with progeria expired between ages 12 and 24. Ali arrived in 1999 and another baby who died shortly after birth, is also thought to have had the disease.
Ali, who is 3ft 7in tall, said, “None of us have had a childhood, we were confined to our homes.
‘We had each other but that was it. We had no life. When we did go to school we were pushed and shoved, called names, kids tried to harm us. We can’t do much physically either; our lungs are so small we get breathless easily.”
However, two of their daughters are healthy, Sanjeeda 20, who is married with two kids and Chanda, the youngest who is ten years old.
Couple learnt about progeria in 1995
The ignorant couple had no idea about the fatal disease when their first daughter Rehana was born in 1983. When she was unable to eat or walk properly after her second birthday, they consulted a doctor but unable to diagnose the problem he sent them home with a few drugs.
The received the same reaction after their son Ikramul was born in 1987 displaying symptoms of progeria. Nabi and Razia only found out about the disease in 1995 when an expert who told them it’s an incurable.
Nabi stated, “The doctors were as clueless as us.If one of them had told us our children had some kind of genetic problem and we were connected we’d have stopped having children.”
