The men in a family in Bangladesh have no fingerprints.
In today’s modern world fingerprints are now collected as a biometric data and used quite widely. The absence of fingerprints can be considered both a blessing and a strange, unusual thing. But this happened to the men of the Sarker family in Rajshahi, northern Bangladesh.
For generations, the men of the Sarker family had smooth fingertips without fingerprints. Many years ago, the absence of fingerprints was not a big problem, but today, when people use fingerprints as a security measure, to identify individuals, the men in the family Sarker was in trouble.
For example, some of the men in this Bangladeshi family are unable to get a driver’s license because of the lack of fingerprints, while others rarely travel for fear of getting into trouble at the airport…
Identifying this family is problematic because they don’t have fingerprints.
Amal Sarker, one of the men with no fingerprints, said: “I paid the fee, passed the exam, but they didn’t issue the degree because I couldn’t provide fingerprints. It was a sad experience. mine” .
Buying a SIM card is also a problem for Sarker men, as the Bangladesh government enacted a law stating the conditions for purchasing a SIM card by storing fingerprints for the national database. Without fingerprints, Apu and Amal Sarker couldn’t get their own SIM cards, and now both use cards bought in their mother’s name.
According to experts, the men in the Sarker family suffer from an extremely rare genetic condition called Adermatoglyphia.
This disease was first known in 2007 when Swiss dermatologist Peter Itin happened to see a woman at the airport having trouble entering the US because she did not have a fingerprint.
Her face is the same as on the passport but her fingertips are completely smooth. The cause of this condition is a mutation in the SMARCAD1 gene , which causes no health effects other than the lack of an entire fingerprint.
Adermatoglyphia is extremely rare, with only a handful of families around the world experiencing the condition.
Dermatologist Eli Sprecher, who helped Peter Itin diagnose the condition, was the one who recommended the men in the Sarker family to have a genetic test to determine if they had Adermatoglyphia.
So far, advanced technology can be of great help to the Sarker family. Apu, Apu’s brother, Apu’s father was able to get a smart card by scanning the retina. According to the National Identity Bureau, these particular men can be identified through retinal scans or facial recognition.