A rally for thalassemia was jointly organised by the Rotary Club of East Calcutta, Rotary Club of Calcutta Kankurgachi and Sudipa Amit Genome Foundation on Sunday.

The rally on bikes and cars and flagged off from Beleghata Sandhani Club was mainly to bring in awareness to the people on the perils of thalassemia and how it can be prevented.

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Subhojit Roy, Rotary district advisor for thalassemia awareness and prevention said the motto of the rally was to generate awareness among people on the genetic disorder. When two careers produce a child there is a 25 per cent chance that the child can be a thalassemia major, said Mr Roy.

“India is one of the thalassemia prone areas and West Bengal is one of them. High percentage of thalassemics are born in Bengal. The Rotary district 3291, from 1 July, has taken up this project in a big way under the leadership of district governor Dr Ramendra Homechaudhuri, though Rotary has been doing this project since 1997, when I started it. Back then we had done a partnership with a Swiss Rotary Club to provide medicine and for iron chelation. We have been doing work primarily in the treatment part. Now, our focus has shifted to advocacy for testing blood of every adult for thalassemia trait,” said Mr Roy.

The HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) is a very simple test, which determines if a person is a career or not and this is available at all government health centres and hospitals free-of-cost and at most private diagnostic centres at a very nominal cost.

The participants said the Sunday rally is an extension of 8 May, which is World Thalassemia Day.

The 70-80 participants were provided with certificates.

One of the participant clubs, Kasba Rotary Club’s Jayanta Chowdhury said: “It is because the awareness levels are not up to the mark that we have not been able to control thalassemia till now. We Rotarians are hopeful that we can stop this with more awareness, just like our efforts on polio have been fruitful.

We have a huge population; we need much larger participation of individuals and organisations. In cities like Kolkata, the message has reached to some extent to people but it needs to percolate to the rural belts.”