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MALE, Monday (AFP) Armed with the cash generated by its high-end tourism industry, Maldives has declared war on thalassemia, a genetic disease of the blood that afflicts nearly one in five of the islanders.

At a cost of about 5,000 dollars a year per patient, the government subsidises the monthly blood transfusions needed to treat thalassemia and has launched a campaign to stop parents from passing it on to their children.

Thalassemic patients cannot produce enough hemoglobin, the substance in red blood cells that transports oxygen from the lungs. Until new medicines were found in the 1970s, few people with severe thalassemia could expect to live past their early 20s. Carriers of thalassemia can now live to be adults - but treatment should begin as soon as an infant is diagnosed with the disease.

Maldives was treating 469 children for thalassemia in 2001, up from 55 in 1988 when the increasingly prosperous country turned its attention to the genetic disorder, shortly after declaring that once widespread malaria had been eradicated.

Thalassemia is most common in South and Southeast Asia and in the eastern Mediterranean region. Maldives has one of the world's highest rates at 18 percent, a phenomenon blamed on the small gene pool in the Indian Ocean archipelago of 270,000 people.

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