The first bone marrow transplantation (BMT) for thalassemia was performed in 1980, since than over 4.000 have been done, so what do we know about people who have undergone BMT many years back?
November 14 2011 saw the birth of a new commitment for volunteers at Sankalp. From a bunch of volunteers taking up emergency blood requests and organizing a few blood donation drives, we took up something more serious and potentially game changing.
Yesterday a family came to seek help for their child who is detected with thalassemia. We meet parents only on Sundays but we made an exception for this family as they had come all the way from a place 600 km away. The 8 month old baby girl had already received 3 transfusions and the family wanted to discuss the prospects of transplants. They had already visited 3 of the very popular BMT centres in the country and taken opinion. Unfortunately though the child had a sibling, his HLA type did not match.
It was around July last year when we decided to put laziness behind and initiate the Sunday get-together for Thalassemia. There was a situation where several parents wanted to meet us and have discussions about various issues faced by their children. We earmarked Sunday as a day for all those meetings with the parents, exploring the strategies to improve the management of the disorder as well as take small steps in direction of the cure.
