HBA2 and thalassemia: The conventional strategy for thalassemia screening includes (a) analysis of blood specimens for CBC, where MCV value ≤80 fL indicates thalassemia carriers, (b) analysis of electrophoresis indices for specimens of the suspected carriers, where a specimen with HbA2 > 3.5 is highly considered as a thalassemia carrier, and (c) testing of specimens with HbA2 > 3.5 at the DNA level, where a mutation in any globin gene confirms the carrier status.