Cooley's anaemia in a Maltese child.

Although almost all the earliest work upon this anaemia was done by Cooley (1927 and 1928), by Cooley and Lee (1925 and 1929), and by Cooley, Witwer, and Lee (1927) in America it soon became clear that the syndrome occurred often in the Mediterranean races. Indeed Davison and Wechsler (1939) believed that the disease originated in Greece, and had been spread to other countries by the conquering armies of Alexander the Great. The first case reported from Italy was by Ravenna and Canella in 1934. In recent years, however, examples have been reported in many other parts of the world. Fawdry (1944) has found 20 cases in Cyprus; Saracoglu (1943) reports four cases amongst Turks; one case is described in a Spanish child, by Sendrail, Lyon, and Lasserre (1936), and another in an English child by Bywaters (1938). Two have been found in Egyptian children (Diwani, 1944), two in Bucharan Jews (Schieber, 1945), and one in a South African of European descent (Altmann, 1946). Additionally, several cases have been reported in Hindus (Malhotra and Chuttani, 1944; Mukherji, 1938; Napier, Shorten, and Das Gupta, 1939); two in Brahmins (Patel and Bhende, 1939; Dhayagude, 1944); five in Chinese (Foster, 1940; Wang and Khoo, 1940); and two in Negroes (Stiles, Manlove, and Dangerfield, 1946; Faber and Roth, 1946). It is interesting to record that one of the Chinese mentioned by Wang and Khoo, and the negro mentioned by Stiles and his colleagues were, in each case, of remote Italian ancestry. In spite of the close proximity of Malta to the Italian peninsula, the case described here is, as far as is known, the first example of the disease to have bxen reported from Malta.