A story in The Los Angeles Times seems to point medical implications of being a sickle cell carrier, Sickle cell trait: The silent killer:
At least 17 high school and college athletes’ deaths have been tied to sickle cell trait during the past 11 years. The group includes Olivier Louis, a player at Wekiva High School near Orlando, who died on Sept. 7, 2010, following his first football practice.
You have surely heard about sickle cell anemia. It is a recessive disease which expresses in those who carry two sickle cell alleles. T-boz of TLC has the disease for example due to her homozygosity. But the allele also famously confers some resistance against malaria, which explains its concentration in regions which have historically been malarial. Sickle cell is arguable the classic case of heterozygote advantage driving the emergence of a recessive disease. The frequency of the allele is balanced at the equipoise between the proportion of people who are more susceptible to malaria if its proportion is too low and those who express sickle cell anemia if its proportion is too high. This advantage is obviously context sensitive. The …