The first child of Dr. Ohene-Frempong had a fatal genetic disease.
Janet Ohene-Frempong said that her husband broke the news to her when he came upstairs with tears in his eyes.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong's mother told him that God was telling him something. She said the message was to use his medical training to help fight the disease. Ms. Ohene-Frempong said that he did that until he drew his last breath.
She said that the most important thing that happened to them was their son's birth. All the work he did was done because of him.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong died in Philadelphia on May 7. He died at the age of 76. His wife said the cause was lung cancer.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong worked at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for decades. The Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center was established at CHOP.
In an interview, Dr. Thompson said that he relied on his wisdom at almost every turn in his career. Part of it was watching what he thought to do to move this field forward.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong was a leader of the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, which helped answer a question: What is the natural course of the disease?
He found that the disease could lead to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cell because of the blocked blood vessels in the brain. Other researchers were able to predict which children were most at risk and discovered that regular blood donations could prevent strokes in those children.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong established a pilot program in his native country to screen newborns for the disease. It was the first such program in Africa. In addition to identifying children with the illness, the program referred them to specialized clinics that provided treatments like antibiotics to prevent infections, routine immunizations and a drug that can reduce the risk of complications from sickle cell.
Kwaku Ohene-Fremong was born on March 13, 1946, to Adwoa Idi Boafu and Kwasi Adde Ohene. A member of a royal family, his father was a cocoa farmer.
He majored in biology at Yale University, where he captained the track and field team, setting indoor and outdoor records in the high hurdles. He met Janet Williams while he was a student. One week after they graduated, they married.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong said in an interview that he first heard about the disease when he and some friends attended a lecture at Yale. He suddenly realized that it was in his family and that it had gone undetected. One of his cousins died at 14.
He said that his cousin was in pain.
After finishing medical school at Yale, Dr. Ohene-Frempong went to New York Hospital to get his residency. He studied at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and went on to become an associate professor of pediatrics at the Tulane University School of Medicine.
He helped the state health department develop a newborn-screening program for the disease while he was at Tulane.
In 1986 Dr. Ohene-Frempong returned to Children's Hospital and stayed there for 30 years before going to work full time at the Kumasi Center for Sickle Cell Disease. He was in Philadelphia for cancer treatment.
He was aware of the limitations of working in Africa. He said that it can be done in America.
As part of that mission, Dr. Ohene-Frempong became president of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana and the national coordinator for the American Society of Hematology's Consortium on Newborn Screening in Africa.
The Millennium excellence Award in Medicine was one of the many honors he received. He received the highest civilian award given by the Public Health Service in the United States in 2020. The American Society for Hematology gave him an award in 2021.
Despite the progress that Dr. Ohene-Frempong and others had made in caring for people with sickle cell disease, his son died at the age of 40, the father of two young children.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong is survived by his wife, three brothers and his daughter.
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