SHIRAZ - Following the preventive measures taken by the government over the past years, the number of patients affected by thalassemia has decreased by 75 percent, Health Minister Kamran Baqeri-Lankarani said here on Saturday night.

Addressing a national conference on thalassemia held in Shiraz, lankarani said “It takes several decades for other nations to reduce carrier rate of thalassemia but in our country we have reached the goal in less than one decade.”
Elaborating the Islamic republic’s great successes in preventing the spread of the diseases (e.g. measles and tetanus), he said that measles deaths are down, from an estimated 3,000 child deaths in 1979 to 40 in 2007