Blood plays an important part in our lives. Especially for the persons who require blood for their survival! Apart from the people who met with accidents, undergone surgeries, or who is in ICU, there are some other people for whom blood is required for every certain time period! Otherwise, there is no hope of ordinary survival. 

Even if they had blood transfusion for a number of times, once a failure in the blood availability can decrease their survival rate! The effects of the disease can be in 6 forms - Iron overload, Infections such as hepatitis, Bone deformities, Enlarged spleen, Slowed growth rate and Heart problems. This Genetic Blood Disorder is termed as Thalassemia. This description of the disease you can find in many web sites! But what is more important is the prevention, diagnosis, & cure.

Since it is a genetic disorder, hereditary, the only way of prevention of this disorder is the parents should decide of not giving birth to a child! That sounds alarming! But, to lead a peaceful life even after we know that our child will have a painful disorder for which there is no permanent cure, the decision should be wise! They can adopt a child! The hereditary occurrence will happen, in cases like, where both the parents are Thalassemia Minor carrying people. Then the chances are like - 25% of Thalassemia Major child, 50% of Thalassemia Minor child and 25% of a Normal child.

Next one is diagnosis - to find out that the person is a Thalassemia Major or Thalassemia Minor! Given its affects above, the only requirement for a successful diagnosis is to have their blood tested! In India, where a 4-15% of population are Thalassemia carriers, being one of the major carrier in the world, and a place where most of the people are very far from minimal medical facilities, except for those living in urban areas; it is predominantly essential that NGOs, charities, missionaries and other organizations, last but not least the Government, should take more and more consideration about the people living in rural areas.

Lastly, the cure for disease is blood transfusion for now. Which requires the people who are ready to donate their blood, which is purely voluntary.

Of-course, there are also some medical research progresses in dealing with this Thalassemia, but keeping-in-mind the rural people, there is still a lot to be done, apart from just inventing the cure and making business out of it!

My personal experience, when I was in Hyderabad, I used to donate blood for a baby child carrying this disorder! I did for three times, after every three months, and now she is no more. Because she is just a child and has very low medical facilities as they were not so financially strong. Her father used to give me one day meal taking me to a nice restaurant after the blood transfusion, even though they were not so good financially. I did not even see her face once, her name is Vaishnavi. There are so many similar cases, few in number, what it takes is just the knowledge of it, donating the blood and remembering the rural people! 

Because, Thalassemia is just one such kind of disorders, where there are many others like Sickle Cell disorder and many more!

More details can be found at the links and at google.com

Thanks,

UVF,

Bangalore