Thalassaemia being a genetic disorder, no curative treatment has yet been discovered.

Bone marrow transplant has to some extent been successful in curing this dreadful disease but getting a matching or compatible donor, extremely high cost of the treatment, and with around 60% success rate(global average), has kept this procedure limited only to a handful of patients amongst hundreds of thousands of patients world wide.

Blood transfusion is virtually the only treatment available to Thalassaemia patients.But blood transfusion has its problems like getting infected with communicable disease like hepatitis B and C, HIV, malaria and others. But most severe problem arising out of blood transfusion is Iron Overload , which affect the vital organs like liver, pancreas, kidney and heart. Even if a patient gets blood transfusion eventually he would die by the age of 18 – 20 years due to heart failure as a consequence of iron overload.

Iron Overload remains the single most expensive part of the blood transfusion dependant treatment of Thalassaemia.Most common therapy for iron chelation is subcutaneous injection of Deferrioxamine, commonly known as desferal, with a micro pump over a period of 10-12 hours, Ideally the injection should be taken every day. However, for practical reasons it is administered 5-6 days a week. The therapy is painful and very expensive, cost of this Therapy can go up to TK. 10-15,000/- per patients, which is beyond the reach of almost all the patients in Bangladesh .

Deferiprone is an alternate to Desferal and it is taken orally.Deferiprone is comparatively cheaper than Desferal. Unfortunately it has a number of severe side effects which make it the second choice for iron chelation therapy.

Splenectomy is another form of treatment. When the spleen becomes too active and starts destroying red cells of the blood,transfusion becomes less and less effective. Then it may becomes necessary to take the spleen out. This operation is called splenectomy.