The Malaria Atlas Project (MAP) is a non-profit project primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust, UK. MAP is a joint project between the Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group, Centre for Geographic Medicine, Kenya and the Spatial Ecology & Epidemiology Group, University of Oxford, UK, with collaborating nodes in Americas and Asia Pacific Region. MAP was founded in 2005 to fill this niche for the malaria control community at a global scale and brings together researchers based around the world with expertise in a wide range of disciplines from public health to mathematics, geography and epidemiology. The ultimate goal is to produce a comprehensive range of maps and estimates that will support effective planning of malaria control at national and international scales. The MAP team have assembled a unique spatial database on linked information based on medical intelligence, satellite-derived climate data to constrain the limits of malaria transmission and the largest ever archive of community-based estimates of parasite prevalence. These data have been assembled and analysed by a team of geographers, statisticians, epidemiologists, biologists and public health specialists.

The Thalasaemia International Federation (TIF) provides on its web site approved presentations from this year's TIF event in Antalya, Turkey (i.e. the 12th International Conference on Thalassaemia and the Haemoglobinopathies and the 14th TIF International Conference for Patients and Parents). The presentations are accessible from here and provided as PDF files and cover a wide variety of topics surrounding thalassaemia.

The multination DEEP project has been launched, a 4-year project aiming to improve the chelation treatment of children with thalassaemia. The primary objectives of the project are to perform pharmacokinetic, efficacy and safety studies of deferiprone in paediatric patients and to provide a new formulation specifically tested for young children. Specifically, DEEP tests pharmacokinetic properties of deferiprone in children under 6 and the efficacy and safety of deferiprone compared to deferasirox therapy in paediatric patients. It further aims to provide long-term data on events potentially related to deferiprone use (alone or in combination with deferoxamine) in children, as observed in a timeframe of 3 years of clinical practice, and to provide a pharmacoeconomic evaluation of deferiprone in the concerned aged group and in comparison with other chelating treatments. The DEEP Consortium is composed of 15 recruiting European Centres (from Italy, Greece, Cyprus) and 7 recruiting non-European Centres (from Egypt, Tunisia, Albania) with scientific partners from the EU and the pharmaceutical group (ApoPharma and APOTEX) based in Canada and in Europe as an industrial partner.