 I am Dr. Harsha Prasad, I am a consultant pediatric hematologist, oncologist and looking after children with primary immunodeficiencies in KMC Hospital, Mangalore. So I am specialized in children presenting with various blood related disorders such as low hemoglobin, high white cell count, high eosinophil count, low neutrophil count, low platelet count, high platelet count. These are the conditions where you usually refer to us for further management. In addition to this, the big role what I play is in treating children with cancer. Childhood cancer is fortunately not common. Having said that, being trained in that and being specialized in that field, I do see roughly around 100 to 110 cases of newly diagnosed childhood cancers per year in Mangalore. In India, roughly around 30 to 40,000 children with cancer have been diagnosed every year. Fortunately, if you diagnose it properly and if you treat it in right time by a right doctor and right medicine and for right duration of time, it is curable. Roughly around 70 to 85% of all childhood cancers can be curable. How do we diagnose? How do we know when someone is having childhood cancer? Majority of the children present with not being in themselves, less active, irritable, not eating well, losing body weight, and unexplained fever, ongoing fever but they couldn't find out the reason for the fever. They may have some kind of frashes, bruises or some lumps or swellings in the neck, groin or in the tummy. Rarely they present with headache, headache, headache and early morning vomiting going on few weeks, two months. The common cancers we see are leukemias in children, then lymphomas, then brain tumors and abdominal tumors, we call it as neuroblastoma and kidney tumors call it as Wilms tumor. The enlarge treatment consists of medicines, what we call it as chemotherapy and surgery in those where there is the tumors or the lumps and some conditions we do give radiations and as well as immunotherapy. Coming to the commonest childhood cancer which is the blood cancer, we call it as leukemia also called as acute lymphoblastic leukemia which is the common type seen in children. They present with low hemoglobin, high white cell count or very low white cell count and low platelet count with the symptoms of fever, weight loss, irritability, cranky, needing to pick him up every now and then. And these children require treatment for few years, usually two and a half years in girls and three or three months in boys. During treatment, we make sure that they feel as normal as they are because childhood is a period where each child will have dreams, wishes, likes and by diagnosing them with these cancers and starting them on this treatment, we are taking away their childhoodness and here with our right approach, we will make sure that they will maintain their childhoodness as much as possible during the therapy. And fortunately, in Mangalore for the past six years, we have treated roughly around 140 cases of acute lymphoblastic leukemia and out of which 80% of them completely survived. So the survival rate here is almost at par with international standards. In addition to this, I also do treat, diagnose and treat children with primary immunodeficiencies What does that mean? Many children are not gaining weight or having recurrent infections such as recurrent ear discharges, recurrent pneumonia, repeated episodes of pneumonia. They keep on coming to the hospitals or repeated episodes of lumps or swellings or pus in the body or some children do develop multiple episodes of tuberculosis. So we need to find out why one developing these infections more often when other children are doing well. That is the job of me to find out why someone gets repeated infections and we will usually investigate these children for the inborn errors of immunity against infection. So these are children born with some defects in their genes, making them prone to get these infections. These are the conditions we call it as primary immunodeficiencies. Once we diagnose, then we offer the right treatment for these children such as replacement for the immunoglobulin if they are deficient in the immunocantibodies or we transfer them to the higher centers for bone marrow transplant. The third aspect with regards to the pediatric hematology. In this, the commonly we come across children with anemia. Anemia is a condition where hemoglobin, the red cell mass in the body is much lower than the what it should be. These children will present with irritability, not active, not eating well, looking little pale. Most of these children present between 9 months to 2 years and during the teenage age group. And sometimes it can be because of excessive milk intake as well. So in this group, we need to diagnose what is the cause for the low hemoglobin usually nutritional and we offer treatment for that. Some of the conditions where anemia could be because of inherited conditions such as called thalassemia. Means the body is not producing good hemoglobin and they will require blood transfusions lifelong. So we need to diagnose them at right time and offer right treatment. Other common condition we come across is low platelet, we call it as ITP. Usually it is common between 2 years to 10 years age group. They present with multiple bruises on the body, blackish patches on the body and it is happening often. And sometimes they present with bleeding in the nose or in the gums and when we look at the complete hemogram, the blood reports showing the very very low platelets. In these children, we need to treat them because there is a potential risk of bleeding depending upon their clinical symptoms rather than just isolated platelet count and fortunately all these conditions are curable and will require good follow up.