From Sofija Popovic, HAE Serbia:

In commemoration of hae day :-) 2021, HAE Serbia organized multiple happenings. Although we decided to cancel all in-person gatherings for the annual awareness day due to sanitary reasons and restrictions regarding group gatherings, we still found numerous ways to mark the day. HAE Serbia held its General Assembly with patients and HAE practitioners online, during which we discussed the association’s progress, ways we raised awareness during the past year and announced the upcoming events. We were also very happy to announce that thanks to our collaboration with Takeda, all HAE patients in Serbia will finally have access to an app that will allow them to track HAE attacks, their length, intensity, pain levels as well as the medications used to treat them. All of the data will be easily transformable to be sent to an HAE specialist and further analyzed. HAE Serbia is grateful for Takeda’s time and effort in making this app that will make tracking attacks so much easier for HAE patients. HAE Serbia has also designed HAE emergency cards which will soon be printed and sent to all Serbian HAE patients.

As part of our efforts to raise awareness on hae day :-) 2021, multiple landmarks in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, and in the city of Nis, were illuminated in purple: the National Assembly, the Avala Tower, the Palace of Albania, Slavija fountain, the Gazela Bridge, Branko’s Bridge, the New Railway Bridge, the Ada Bridge and the National Theatre in Nis. We also created a hashtag #osvetlimohae, which translates to “Light up for HAE”, which we used when sharing pictures of all the landmarks that glowed purple on social media. All of this was reported by multiple media outlets, as well as the interviews with the President of HAE Serbia, Jovana Cvetkovic. Even though we were unable to meet in person for the second year in a row, we still found ways to come together for HAE and raise awareness among the general public and are very thankful for everyone who participated.