Developmental `Misses` of the Nervous System

If you happen to travel to Kwahu anytime soon (and I would from the bottom of my heart recommend you do, plus, you are cordially invited), you should find your way to a “city” called Abetifi, (a Presbyterian-University-township) and when there, search for a building called “Kyiremudan”, virtually anyone you might encounter in the street should guide you. It is a kind of cultural arts and crafts center. You may not find anybody with a key to let you enter it, and I am not sure, whether you would be so enticed entering this not-very-big-building without any windows.

There should be enough outside the building to keep you busy, and for hours, if you tend to be as lucky as I was, when I visited some twenty years ago. There was a man who knew something about every figure on the walls. You should pray that the curator I met is still in place. One object that pre-occupied me almost the entire span of time was the conjoined reptiles, two of them sharing a gut, and spinal cord (part of the central nervous system).

The curator endowed me with one saying; “those returning from their farms won't find you, if you entered the world wrongly.” He said it, whilst pointing to a grotesquely looking creature on the wall. “Entering the world wrongly?” I kept asking myself. “Would anybody want to do that? Incongruous!

In times past, it was seldom to find individuals with weird disfigurements walking about in the communities. Were there any births that way? Probably yes, but what usually happened to them is contained in the curator's remarks as cited above. It is common knowledge that the “sperm” and the “ovum” unite, each one contributing an aggregate of genetic materials that would “direct” the end-result of what an individuum (the individual) comes out to be, male or female, tall, short, flat-nosed, etc.

That is when all situations move in the normal direction. But, frequently, things don't navigate that orderly. The spectrum is so wide and so complicated with the intention of satisfying personalities that seek to “shop into their basket of general knowledge.” We would stay in the realm of congenital malformations of the Central Nervous System, which you will encounter, henceforth as CNS. There are a series of events that goes on in quick succession, all in what is termed the 1st semester of pregnancy. Imagine what should make you into an Albert Einstein, or Enrico Fermi, all happening in ninety days, after what is called fertilisation had taken place.

In summary, there develops a plate, called in neuro-embryology, the neural plate, followed by the neural tube at the cephalad end (the head end), of which a bubble develops, which should later stratify to form our brain. Every chain in this development is in” such a hurry”, that steps, or missteps, are potential dangers. They do happen.

Let us just call the missteps “misses”, because with them, our brains could so develop that with influence of the environment thereafter, we could become Nobel Laureates, or otherwise, people that mankind would like to forget quickly, even before they may pass away. Don't let us cite any examples. The processes leading to development of the CNS, as mentioned above, simplified, with first the neural plate, the neural tube, and subsequently the “bubbles” that lead to the formation of the brain, could for various reasons, both known and unknown, come to a halt.

Substances, both natural and man-made, the “potato-blight” in Northern Ireland, Aflatoxin in many parts of our own “Sub-region”, and vitamin deficiencies, folic acid being the one mostly studied. The saddest part of the issue is that the unknown factors must outweigh the supposedly known ones. We know that highly developed regions of the world, where vitamin deficiencies are unknown, are nevertheless not spared from these monstrous developmental anomalies, even if less seldom encountered.

Disasters like the intentional Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions of 1945, or the accidental Chernobyl nuclear explosion of 1986 (or the three-mile-island fall-out of 1979), continue to churn out malformations in humans that are not compatible with normal life, or at all with life. From the medical/surgical standpoint, victims affected by such misses in their intra-uterine milestones, tend to remain physically or mentally retarded, even after extensive corrective surgical processes have been undertaken. They remain a financial and social liability to every society. Efforts are being tirelessly made towards alleviating these unpleasant components of our daily lives.

When encountered, threats of families breaking up erupt, mostly due to unnecessary apportioning of blames, and at times as an attempt of (mostly the man) running away from responsibility, turning an otherwise promising family life into a bright future, instead into disaster. Europe, especially in the era preceding and during the “Third Reich”, made the attempt of reducing the incidence of such occurrences by applying Eugenics, or actively eliminating individuals who manifested such malformations. It would not be an exaggeration, nor cause of condemnation, to recommend “some kind of medical counseling, before even madly in love couple, tie the knot…

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