Much more about this disease can be found at the following URL:- <http://www.thalassemia.com/message.shtml> Muriel M. Davidson <davidson3542@home.com> ========================================= Hello Muriel, My husband's family is from Italy and we have only known them in the last year because of family related problems. About 24 years ago my nephew got very ill and was in the hospital a few days and had all kinds of tests run. The doctors could find nothing wrong with this little boy until a new Registered Nurse, right out of school, noticed a blood disorder and did some checking. She found he had Thalassemia and then we learned that father passes to daughters and mothers passes this disease on to sons. We knew nothing about it until reading further and discovered that it came from Italy with the Grandparents. My husband and daughters have a light case of it, but it his my sister-in-law's children who have more severe illnesses. We began a search for the family in 1969 and it took us until 1999 to find them and if we had been successful, we might have saved a cousin's life. The Uncle had been treated for years for anemia and iron supplements only made him swell up and his feet would get huge so he stopped taking the iron. In the meantime, we found them and they had a daughter die, bad blood plus other symtoms but no one knew what was the cause. When the Uncle came to Maine to meet us and we got discussing Health problems, he told us he didn't know of anything in the family--so we gave him all the information we could find and now at 89 years of age, he is getting the right kind of treatment for the illness. It is the most common inherited Single gene disorder in the world. It is a blood disorder characterized by the absent or decreased production of normal Hemoglobin. It causes low blood, and in children caused them not to sleep well or eat well either. The bone marrow cannot produce enough red blood cells amd there is no known cause other then inherited. We do not speak Itialian - the grandparents did, but they are all gone now. The uncle was born in Italy, but my father-in-law was born in the United States. There is a site - - www.geocites.com/HotSprings/5917/thal3.htm that has information on this and there are a lot of sources on the internet now that we didn't have many years ago when the children were small and growing. [Site not available in Canada] We had no idea that there was any disease inherited from the family, but anyone with several different backgrounds should be aware of this sneaky desease. I am sure that you can find many sites for info on this. I just wish that we could have known early enough to have saved the life of a relative, but hopefully we can pass on information and save future generations from Thalassemia!! We need the census to help trace the background of our families to learn what is in our backgrounds that is harmful to all of us. We know this has been in the family probably since 1920, and since it is inherited, it has most likely been in the Bruno family for many, many years. I hope this message will help some. I don't have my files here at home where I can get to them, but there are a lot of places to check for further information. Thanks and all the best of luck Geraldine Black Maine <jblack@ainop.com>