Tenth anniversary of Thalassaemiehilfe ohne Grenzen (Thalassemia Relief without Borders) â Volunteers for young and adult patients with an hereditary anemia The Association Thalassemia Relief Without Borders completed its tenth anniversary in September 2017. Thalassemia affects around five million children, adolescents and adults worldwide in its acute form. This disease complex is one of the so-called rare or orphan diseases in Europe. This hereditary blood anomaly is also known by the colloquial term Mediterranean anemia. If no sufficiently qualified medical treatment is available, children will generally not survive their second year of life. Patients are life-long transfusion-dependent and dependent on special drugs. The association, in which Sardinian cultural associations from Baden-Württemberg are also involved as consultants and assessors, has carried out around 14,000 consultations for Thalassemics or their relatives since 2007. Our members provide their time and labor exclusively on a voluntary basis and provise help not only in the German-speaking countries. Again and again, requests for advice and assistance from Arab countries, India, Southeast Asia or Australia are incoming in the mailbox of our association. The most recent request came from Sri Lanka. In addition, in these ten years the association has provided material and financial support to families with thalassemia patients in Germany and abroad. Special emphasis was put on donations of clothes and school supplies for families in need in Sardinia and for affected refugees from war zones of the Mediterranean region as well as occasional food donations. The affected can, assuming a suitable donor, be cured with a stem cell transmission in unfortunately rare cases. Therefore, the club has always assisted to donor search with help and advice. Every year, nearly estimated 40,000 children with a severe form of thalassemia are born worldwide. In total, 560 million people are affected by such blood anomalies. Thalassemias have been in the world for at least 10,000 years. They were triggered by malaria mosquitoes, this is now considered secure. Curiously, patients with thalassemia are protected against malaria. The malaria parasite, which these mosquitoes pass on when sucking blood, cannot mature in the red blood cells of the patients, as they decompose faster in a thalassemia than it takes time. Jürgen M. Beith, president of the association, still has four things to worry about: "Not all countries have sufficient and easily accessible medical facilities that provide affordable care, especially for small patients. Many parents have to be heavily involved in medical care. Also, there are not in all countries enough safe blood. In medical research, there is still too little understanding of the relationship between the different forms of thalassemia and a number of comorbidities. Fourth, Germany still lacks an independent competence center for hemoglobinopathies, ie diseases and anomalies of the hematopoietic system. " It gives hope that at the same time research is being carried out in several countries on a gene correction for the hereditary traits of thalassemia, and in fact initial successes have already been reported. At the University Children's Hospital Tübingen, a team led by Professor Michael Kormann also is working on this topic. A gene correction aims at healing the patients. It should replace the very risky bone marrow or stem cell transplantation and also free patients from lifelong transfusion dependence. © Thalassämiehilfe ohne Grenzen 2018