Nigeria, March 2 -- Inside the living room of a home in Nigeria's northern city of Kaduna, a newlywed couple looked at their third-born son and named him Onwuzueike, "death must cease."

It was less a nomenclature and more a desperate petition.

They had already buried two sons before their tenth birthdays, one lost to a bike accident and another to what could have been a routine eye surgery.

Both were victims of an unceasing bleed that family rumours had instead attributed to "spiritual curse."

But for the third son, Victor Ugochukwu, the curse would later find a name: Haemophilia A.

He was born into a body with a "Factor 8" protein level of 0.01 per cent, a misfortune that meant a fall at age five wouldn't just result in a bruise, bu...