The Beijing Angelmom Charity Foundation started providing aid to poor children with thalassemia five years ago, after a distraught mother from Guanxi province sought help for her son, Jingsheng. While the rest of the family had given up on him, his mother refused to, and brought her son to Beijing to look for help with the following words: “if my child’s disease is curable, then cure it; if not, I will just die with him”. With the help of Angelmom, Jingsheng was able to continue living.
“Little Jingsheng made us aware of thalassemia”, executive vice-president of Angelmom Qiu Lili says, “but another child with this disease that we wanted to save passed away”. The team had a lot of regrets over this, so they decided to set up a thalassemia saving program, hoping to help more children with this inherited blood disorder.
The program primarily works on funding severe thalassemia patients with hematopoietic stem cell transplants and supporting poor families with blood transfusions and splenectomy. “In these five years, Angelmom directly funded more than 400 children with thalassemia, including funding more than 170 cases of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. The success rate of the surgeries funded has reached 93.66%”, explains Qiu Lili.
Angelmom not only provides financial support for children with thalassemia, but also works on promoting policies and awareness and improving medical technology. Every year since 2010, during the annual session of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), Angelmom will put forward a proposal, which includes thalassemia aid, child organ transplants and other relevant areas. Their proposals have already been approved twice, greatly helping kids with thalassemia at the systemic level.
