The approach to treating a patient with severe anemia often includes blood transfusion, however transfusion therapy is not uniformly available in all parts of the world. In this session two speakers will discuss their recent high impact publications that studied the use and availability of blood transfusion in low and middle income nations. The speakers will join a panel at the end of the session for question and answer with the audience.

Professor Kath Maitland is Professor of Paediatric Tropical Infectious Diseases at the Faculty of Medicine and Director of the ICCARE Centre at the Institute for Global Health Innovation, Imperial College, London and an Honorary Fellow at MRC Clinical Trials Unit, University College, London. Dr Maitland is based in East Africa, where she leads a research group tackling childhood mortality in resource-limited hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa. Her research portfolio includes severe malaria, bacterial sepsis and severe malnutrition. In this lecture, Dr Maitland will describe the treatment of severe life-threatening anaemia in children and improving childhood mortality in low resource settings.

Dr Christina Fitzmaurice, MD, MPH, is an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, and Attending physician of Hematology/Oncology at St. Charles Medical System. Her research interests focus on global oncology and cancer disparities. In this lecture, Dr Fitizmaurice will describe a global modeling study that enumerated the available blood inventory in every nation and the need for more blood products in many low and middle income nations.