PESHAWAR, July 29: Doctors have urged the people to go for genetic tests before getting married so that the new born could be saved from the fatal thalassaemia disease.

The NWFP has 20,000 children suffering from thalassaemia, and about 8,000 more join them every year. About 70 per cent of these cases were because of marriages between cousins, said Dr Sajidullah.

He was addressing an award distribution ceremony of Dua Welfare Organization and the Thalassaemia Centre at the Peshawar Press Club on Thursday. According to him, there was a dire need for implementing a law under which all the young people had their blood tests conducted before they got married.

Dr Sajid said that most of the developed countries had put in place laws by the virtue of which it was obligatory upon the people to undergo genetic tests before marriages.

Thalassaemia, he said, was a fatal disease in which the blood formation mechanism of the body becomes partially or totally ineffective in early childhood and the sufferer needed blood transfusion every four months.

There was no treatment except bone-marrow transplantation, which cost Rs1.2 million, and the patients needed Rs20,000 for subsequent treatment every month.

Such treatment, he said, was more expensive and hence out of the reach of the poor people. The only hope, therefore, lied in pre-marriage tests to ensure that the thalassemic children were not born, he said.

Secretary of the Thalassaemia Centre, Aslam Khan, deplored that lack of official patronage had affected the treatment of the patients. According to him lack of awareness was the main problem, saying that the people held wrong notions about donating blood.

"There is a misconception that donating blood weakened the donor, whereas the fact was that it was good for the healthy people to donate blood every three months," he said.

Mr Khan said that despite limited resources, the centre was providing blood transfusion facilities to 15 children everyday and urged the philanthropists and the government to help the centre treat the patients.

He said that the centre had also established a hospital, where the patients were examined and given drugs by charging only Rs10. Efforts were on to install ultrasound and ECG machines to cater to the needs of other patients as well, he added.