6th BIBMC 2022: Thalassemia

On this day (5/10/22), I joined the 6th BIBMC online conference for the Thalasemia topic where the panelist in this session is Prof. Suthat Fucharoen, MD, PhD.

The conference for this topic started at around 10:30 where the first speaker was Lulu Eva Rakhmilla, dr, M.KM. The topic that she brought was surrounding the community situation and update of thalassemia, where she talked about the spread and urgency surrounding thalassemia in Indonesia.

The next speaker was Dr. Susi Susanah, dr, SpA(K), Mkes., where she talked about the clinical updates, specifically about iron overload which is the cause of severe complications of B-Thalassemia.

The next speaker to follow Dr. Susi was dr. Pandji Irani Fianza, Sp.PD-KHOM, MSc. , where she also talked about the clinical updates of thalassemia, specifically about complication and management of thalassemia and the difference between Transfusion Dependent Thalassemia (TDT) and Non-Transfusion Dependent Thalassemia (NTDT).

Lastly, Prof. Dr. Kittipong Paiboonsukwong, MD., PhD., spoke about the biomedical sciences innovation aspect where he talked about microbiota and thalassemia.

After that, a discussion session followed before the conference end with a summary that was delivered by Prof. Ramdan Panigoro, dr, MSc.

The conference taught me that even though thalassemia seemed to be a simple disease, there is still so much to do to prevent this disease to spread and the step of prevention has to start as early as possible, by educating school-aged children about the importance of selecting marriage partners or having a genetic counselling session before deciding to have children of their own.