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.

In order to serve the community better, faster, and more reliably, we have renewed our web server. We are pleased to inform you that our server has now been upgraded and fully functional as before, and we apologize for any inconvenience you might have been experiencing for the last few days. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us from here.

The International Advisory Committee of the ITHANET Portal has recently been extended with the help and commitment of the experts of the haemoglobinopathy community. Here is the current list of committee members:
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In order to facilitate the communication between the community and the experts of haemoglobinopathies, we have established a simple interface for asking questions. Go ahead and challenge us with your questions. What is haemoglobinopathy?

We are currently updating the interface of the ITHANET Organizations&Networks Database with improved search&filter functionality. Please do let us know of your opinion for designing a more user-friendly and easy-to-use interface.

An advisory committee of experts in haemoglobinopathies from around the world has recently been gathered in order to boost the development of the ITHANET Portal. The committee will advise on possible additions and improvements on the portal, and provide expert opinion when needed. We invite you in your capacity as an expert in the field of haemoglobinopathies to become a member of this committee. The current members include:
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If you have a recent publication on haemoglobinopathies, or if you came across one which is not listed in the ITHANET Portal, please let us know.

The ITHANET network is hosting a collaborative project intended to map KLF1 mutations and HbF levels including the Gγ ratio. We would like to invite your participation in this project. Details of the study can be found here.

The ITHANET Frequency database lists the frequencies of the observed and reported hemoglobin mutations in over 40 countries world-wide. The gradient plotting of frequencies on the map allows spatial analysis of the distribution of certain mutations over neighboring or distant countries. The database interface is now accessible from http://www.ithanet.eu/base/freq.

The ITHANET Portal houses 4 interconnected databases: the haemoglobin mutation database, the HbF reactivator database, the genotype-phenotype database, and the frequency database. Currently the first two of these databases are up and running. The mutation database has detailed information on about 1500 known haemoglobin mutations, displayed on genomic sequence with advanced search and filtering capabilities. For medical experts and researches of the field, it is fairly straightforward to curate and expand this collection of haemoglobin mutations. If you are thinking of contributing to the development of the ITHANET Base, please contact us at the ITHANET Portal. The remaining databases are currently under development, and they are expected to be online soon. Please follow our news feed for further developments on the portal and the databases at RSS Feeds.

The home page for the ITHANET Portal is renewed! It is now easier to spot recent changes to the portal, wiki and the databases under the "news" section. Also, you may want to check out the recent collection of meetings and conferences under the "events" section. The ITHANET Portal also houses a collection of the most recent and interesting publications about haemoglobinopathies under the "publications" section. For any questions, comments or suggestions please contact us at ithanet@ithanet.eu.