BADIN, Aug 6: Badin District Nazim Kamal Chang has said that the district government will impose a ban on the registration of Nikah unless a couple undergoes genetic tests before getting married.

Speaking at the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Thalassaemia Care Centre here on Friday, he said that most of developed countries had enforced laws making it obligatory upon the people to undergo genetic tests before marriages.

The centre is being set up by the Thalassaemia Care Citizens' Community Board with the technical collaboration of Hussaini Blood Bank, Karachi, at a cost of Rs1.4 million on a 13,000-foot plot donated by the district government.

Thalassaemia, the nazim said, was a fatal disease in which blood formation mechanism of the body became partially or totally ineffective in early childhood and the victim needed continued blood transfusion.

He said that there was no treatment except bone marrow transplantation which was expensive and, hence, out of the reach of poor people. The only hope, therefore, lied in pre-marriage tests to ensure that thalassaemic children would not be born to the couple to be married, Mr Chang concluded.

A representatives of the Hussaini Blood Bank, Sarfaraz Hussain Jafri, said that 30 per cent of the population of Badin district was minor carrier of thalassaemia. He said that 12 spots had been selected in Sindh for controlling the fatal disease in the province within four to five years.

Mr Jafri said that the Badin Thalassaemia Care Centre would be one of the most equipped modern model project in the country. He said that till the completion of the project, the blood bank would pay Rs60,000 for salary of doctors and Rs120,000 for other expenses incurred on treatment of thalassaemic patients.

He said that those intelligent youths having passed BSc would be imparted training and paid Rs3,000 per month stipend during training. He urged the district government and the citizens' board to form volunteers group for collection of blood, and appealed to factory owners to motivate their workers for donating blood to thalassaemic people.

He informed the audience that 100 per cent of the Iranian population donated blood. Programme manager of the provincial Safe Blood Transfusion Authority Farhana Memon said that only eight blood banks in Pakistan were registered, five of them in Karachi. She said that due to non-implementation of the law against those providing unscreened blood, many unauthorized blood banks played havoc with the lives of the people.