What your money does for children with genetic disorders?

So, I went to the official site for Jeans for Genes and I found this:

• £10 will pay for 60 minutes of specialist telephone advice for parents caring for a child with severe neurological genetic conditions.  
• £50 will pay for a mother to attend a support day, giving her the help she needs to care for an extremely rare and profoundly disabling genetic condition.
• £100 will help fund an educational booklet, helping teachers to maximise opportunities available to children with inherited learning disabilities.
• £150 will pay for one child carer to enjoy a summer camp, enabling them to meet others in a similar situation, share experiences, reduce feelings of isolation and giving them some much needed fun
• £250 will help fund a website where children affected with sex development disorders can obtain information and support, without the need to disclose their identity
• £500 will pay for 5 families, affected by profound disabilities, to enjoy an adaptive skiing session, where they can have fun, build confidence and friendships with others in similar situations.  
• £1,000 will help fund a film for teenagers with a life limiting condition, helping them to come to terms with, and encouraging them to begin to take responsibility for, their condition.
• £2,000 will help fund a sensory toy warehouse for children with a rare premature aging disorder, enhancing their senses and providing parents with a way to fun and pleasurable way to engage with their child who might otherwise have limited ways of interacting.

Right now, we as a school are just above the £500 mark... and I think we can go past the £1000 mark at least this year, but that will all depend on how the school's community responds....

Just think of the happiness those families will be feeling due to our contribution....

Genetic disorders - their reasons...

I am no expert in biology and I haven't done biology since grade 8 so instead of me making a fool of myself by trying to explain to you all what causes genetic disorders, I found an article... :)

What is a genetic disease?

A genetic disease is any disease that is caused by an abnormality in an individual's genome. The abnormality can range from minuscule to major -- from a discrete mutation in a single base in the DNA of a single gene to a gross chromosome abnormality involving the addition or subtraction of an entire chromosome or set of chromosomes. Some genetic disorders are inherited from the parents, while other genetic diseases are caused by acquired changes or mutations in a preexisting gene or group of genes. Mutations occur either randomly or due to some environmental exposure.

What are the different types of inheritance?

There are a number of different types of genetic inheritance, including the following four modes:

Single gene inheritance

Single gene inheritance, also called Mendelian or monogenetic inheritance. This type of inheritance is caused by changes or mutations that occur in the DNA sequence of a single gene. There are more than 6,000 known single-gene disorders, which occur in about 1 out of every 200 births. These disorders are known as monogenetic disorders (disorders of a single age).

Some examples of monogenetic disorders include:

• cystic fibrosis,
• sickle cell anemia,
• Marfan syndrome,
• Huntington's disease, and
• hemochromatosis.
  
  
  This is the link of the website - http://www.medicinenet.com/genetic_disease/article.htm

1 in 200 births..... That is a very high number.... I guess genetic disorders are more common than I thought... This has given me more encouragement to do what I am doing... Hope some of you also think about contributing to this cause....

Vacations!

So, I am now on vacation and I will try to keep the blog updated as much as possible, but I don't think I will be able to update it every week... So my target is once in two weeks... Let's see how well that goes :)

In the mean time - I will leave you all to think about this:

I came across this while I was researching for Jeans for Genes and Sunflower Fund....