Latin America needs more plasma

The Latin American Society for Immune Deficiency (LASID) held its bi-annual meeting in Cancun in October 2019.

It was a very impressive meeting that started in its opening session with a short video of patient testimonials. I was not aware that in Mexico, children with primary immune deficiency only receive treatment with immune globulins until they are 5 years old. This was the first time that I saw young children making a plea to their policy makers to keep their (needed) therapy available to them. I must say that this was one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. Children of that age making well formulated statements that make you think hard about the challenges that they are facing!

I was able to meet with various experts to talk about the specific challenges in Latin America. These challenges are well shown in a presentation that I made on behalf of Patrick Robert from Marketing Research Bureau who was unable to attend for medical reasons. One of the slides show the difference between the use of immunoglobulins in the United States (5% of the world population using 46% of all IG’s) and Latin America (9% of the world population using 5% of all IG’s). The entire presentation can be seen under the tab presentations.
The global patient organization IPOPI held various meetings and discussed ways how to help the different national organizations with supporting the many patients that need immunoglobulin therapies.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done and I ma happy to help!

Jan M Bult
October 2019