The Hindu : New Delhi News : Relief for thalassemia patients

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 13, 2006
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Relief for thalassemia patients

Staff Reporter

Govt. to provide new oral iron chelators free of cost

NEW DELHI: Delhi Finance Minister Ashok Walia on Saturday announced that the Delhi Government would provide new oral iron chelators -- that reduce the iron overload in the body of thalassemia patients -- to thalassemics registered with Government hospitals free of cost as and when they are available in the market.

Inaugurating the two-day "Fifth National Thalassemia Conference" organised by National Thalassemia Welfare Society (NTWS), Dr. Walia said the State Government would also allocate a 50-bed ward specifically for thalassemia patients. He added that the Government had already been providing free iron chelators to the registered patients.

President of NTWS Surender Saini urged the Finance Minister to include thalassemia in the list of disabled so that thalassemics are also able to avail of benefits extended to the physically challenged persons.

The new iron chelators are likely to rid the patients of dangerous side effects that some of the earlier medicines had. According to the NTWS, a thalassemia patient appears normal at birth but he becomes severely anaemic by the time he is three months. Sometimes, the disability can be diagnosed when the child is around 18 months old.

These children can survive only through repeated blood transfusion every two or four weeks. But, while absolutely necessary for survival, blood transfusions also can cause various complications, besides infections contracted during the process.

One of the main complications is iron overload in the body. When the RBCs infused in the body break down into protein and iron after their normal life span of 120 days, the body of thalassemia patients becomes virtually a store-house of extra iron, said a NTWS spokesperson.

The extra iron tends to get deposited in various parts of the body damaging vital organs. Iron overload can also lead to hypothyroidism, diabetes, delayed or missed puberty, liver and heart failure and ultimately death.

One of the medicines that the thalassemia patients have been using for the 35 years required slow special infusion for eight to 12 hours a day to get rid of iron overload.

However, an oral medicine reducing iron overload in the patients, which was introduced in the United States and Europe in the 1990's, was discovered to have serious side-effects like reduction in white cells and nutrophils. This affected the defence mechanisms of the body and caused arthritis.

A new oral iron chelator has now been launched in the US on November 3 and, earlier, in European Union on August 30 by the brand name Exjade by Novartis, which now plans to launch it in India, said the NTWS.

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