Seriously, I wonder how many kinds of sickle cell disease there are. There is one type found in West Africa (and among Americans of African ancestry), and another found around the Mediterranean (thalassemia). Is the type found in Egypt the same as one of those or a third type?
The two conditions are the same. The reason such a lethal gene is so common in people of African and Mediterranean descent is because these areas are in the “malarial belt”. If a person had two genes for hemoglobin A (AA), the person was likely to die of malaria. If the person had sickle cell anemia (SS), they were likely to die of their disease. The heterozygous individual (AS) had the best chance of survival because they did not have the adverse effects of sickle cell disease, but the malarial organism apparently does not survive as well in the heterozygous individual so the person did not die from malaria either.