Children of Manbij suffer Thalassemia in light of limited medicine and expensive treatment
Manbij – North-Press Agency
Jihad Nabo
In a small center at Al-Furat Hospital in Manbij, a large number of children are receiving treatment for thalassemia, amid a severe shortage of medicines and medical supplies for the disease, as the families of the sick children suffer poor access to treatment for their children.
Nouria al-Ahmad, 50 years, a mother of two girls with thalassemia since an early age, one of them is 19 years old, who has been ill since she was only seven-month-old, Nouria says that the poor financial situation is a major obstacle to her, as the injection for treatment of the disease is not available in Manbij, so she ought to travel every two months to Tal Abyad to get the syringes for them, which costs her a lot of money.
Thalassemia is a genetic disorder of the blood that causes a decrease in the number of red blood cells in the body from the normal rate, which causes anemia.
This genetic disorder does not appear in the parents but affects their children; it can be first detected by medical tests, in addition to external symptoms that appear as the pallor of the patients’ face, general weakness, loss of appetite, nausea and aching joints.
“Treatment is rare”
Fatima Sheikh Muhammad, a nurse says while busy changing a blood bag for a patient, that people in the city keep talking about the disease and the center, due to the overcrowding of patients in the center despite its small size.
Children’s thalassemia is treated by frequent blood transfusion but in severe thalassemia cases, bones marrow must be transplanted, which is expensive for the vast majority of patients and is rare in the region.
The currently available solution is to transfuse blood on an ongoing basis, as the younger the children are, the more blood transfusions they need.
Blood transfusions are done constantly every month or every 20 days, in addition to Desferal medications, which are rare to be found, medicines are given daily to children with thalassemia as long as the blood transfusion continues.
Al-Furat Hospital administration refused to comment on the reason for the lack of thalassemia medications, especially that the number of patients being treated in the hospital is almost 340 children.
It’s worth mentioning that the cases of children with thalassemia in Manbij were deteriorated during the control of the Islamic State group over the city, as ISIS militants prevented patients from traveling outside their areas of control, which led to the loss of some children’s lives at that time.