SINGAPORE – Mannat Singh was only six days old when he was diagnosed with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID).

This meant that he was born without a functioning immune system, making him highly vulnerable to even the common flu. Without treatment, Mannat would not have made it past his first birthday.

His mother Harminder Kaur, 39, a nurse, recalled the guilt and fear she felt “because I made him this way”.

SCID is a rare life-threatening genetic disorder that affects one in 50,000 babies worldwide, with one new case born in Singapore every two years.

“It did not help our state of mind when his odds were stacked against him,” said her husband Harminder Singh, 39, an IT consultant.

It is also known as the “bubble boy disease” after David Vetter, an American boy with the disease who captured the world’s attention for living all his life in a sterile plastic enclosure – his “bubble”.

At the time of his birth in 1971, a bone marrow transplant from an exact matched donor was the only cure for SCID, but there was no match available in David’s family.

In 1984, four months after receiving a bone marrow transfusion via a new technique, the 12-year-old died from lymphoma, a cancer later traced to a dormant Epstein-Barr virus in the donor bone marrow.

As for baby Mannat, he had Artemis SCID, a rare form of recessive radiosensitive SCID, which meant he could not be treated with radiation or have certain scans done.

Memories of what the couple went through with their younger son brought back tears to Mr Singh, who said: “We were prepared to do whatever we could to give Mannat the best chance at life. We took a step at a time, discussing putting him on chemotherapy and deferring to the experts.”

Fortunately for Mannat, his condition was picked up at the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) through the National Expanded Newborn Screening (Nens) programm...