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| Mosquito Aedes aegypti transmits dengue |
Neglected Tropical Diseases are caused by lack of clean water, poor hygiene, and parasites that thrive in areas of poverty in areas such as Africa, China, and Central America, among others. They cause terrible health devastation to a billion people.
Those living in the northern hemisphere should be concerned too because of migration from all parts of the world into North America and Europe.
NTDs simply lack the global profile of HIV-Aids and malaria, despite killing thousands of people each year.
The Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) are a group of parasitic and bacterial infections that affect circa 1 billion people. These diseases are named "neglected" because they persist exclusively in the poorest and most marginalized populations. NTDs stigmatize, disable and inhibit individuals from being able to care for themselves or their families - all of which promote poverty. Many of these diseases are fatal.
Examples of Neglected Tropical Diseases:
Trachoma is the world’s leading cause of preventable blindness.
Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease caused by trematode flatworms.
Lymphatic filariasis (LF) - elephantiasis - mosquito-borne parasitic disease caused by worms
Also leprosy, sleeping sickness, chagas disease, dengue fever, and more
The Guardian - A huge programme by the World Health Organisation designed to tackle NTDs, but according to Dr Peter Hotez, who is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, and president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, the rise of NTDs among poor people in Asia and the Americas has gone largely unnoticed.
China, the world’s second largest economy, which has an incredible amount of poverty. “We’re finding a lot of NTDs in the south-west, in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, such as intestinal worm infections, and there’s still schistosomiasis and food-borne trematode infections. Liver fluke and kung fluke are looming very large in northern and southern China.”
Hotez also singled out northern Argentina, southern Mexico and the southern US as areas where a handful of NTDs are common. He pointed particularly to Texas and the Gulf coast, where researchers are reporting cases of dengue, Chikungunya, Chagas disease and parasitic worm infections such as Cysticercosis or Toxocariasis. |
“While immigration is not a zero component, it’s a very modest component,” he said. “It’s actually because Texas and the Gulf coast are at the confluence of poverty, warm climate and the fact that we’ve got the vectors here that transmit the diseases.”
Hotez, who estimates that about 12 million Americans have one or more tropical diseases, said he was frustrated at the lack of awareness of NTDs in the US and the refusal to link their prevalence to economic deprivation.
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“It’s almost as though we do not want to admit that we have poverty in this country,” he said. “But the truth is that we have 20 million Americans who live in extreme poverty and almost 2 million Americans living on less than $2 a day – and they’re all infected with NTDs.”
Infectious diseases, added Hotez, rarely grabbed the headlines unless they appeared exotic or unusually terrifying. “It’s all about what, in my frustration, I call the imaginary illnesses that scare white people: so it’s all about smallpox, anthrax, avian flu and now, of course, Ebola,” he said. “In the meantime, people stay focused on that instead of the 12 million Americans who are already infected with NTDs and who are not getting diagnosed or treated, and for whom there are no efforts at public health intervention.”
But, he said, the economic arguments of tackling NTDs in countries such as the US, India and China were overwhelming. “Chronic hookworm infection in childhood shaves IQ points off kids and reduces future wage earning by 40%,” he said. “Lymphatic filariasis makes people too sick to go to work every day. India loses a billion dollars a year.”
A major problem, said Hotez, was that NTDs simply lack the global profile of HIV-Aids and malaria, despite killing thousands of people each year.
“Dengue has reached an estimated 390 million people around the world,” he said. “Everyone’s wringing their hands about the Ebola epidemic but of course dengue kills around 20 times as many people. It’s kind of a silent pandemic, but it kills 14,700 people a year. We have other diseases, like Chagas, that kills another 10,000 people, and Leishmaniasis, which kills another 50,000 people.”
Although he commended the US and UK governments for providing three-quarters of the global research and development budget for NTDs, Hotez said they had shouldered the financial burden for too long. While many governments were “a bit tapped-out” because of their contributions to HIV research, and the fight against tuberculosis and malaria, they needed to get involved, he said.
“We’re working on the French and the Germans, who, I think are going to be very important. But we need to look even beyond the north and get all of the G20 countries involved – especially the Brics [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]. They need to do more to invest globally in research and development. China especially is investing billions of dollars in sub-Saharan Africa, but what are they doing for neglected tropical diseases? Not enough.”
Hotez’s biggest frustration – apart from the “very siloed” nature of international disease research; “the Aids people do not talk to the malaria people and do not talk to the NTD people and we’re missing important opportunities” – is explaining to world leaders what an immense difference could be made to millions if the funds and political will to eliminate NTDs were more forthcoming.
“The term ‘low-hanging fruit’ is overused but you get the idea that we could have a big impact with a relatively modest investment,” he said. “You’d get a lot of bang for your buck.”
With additional information from
RELATED
Neglected Tropical Diseases
Neglected Tropical Diseases Network
Center for Neglected Tropical Diseases
http://www.cntd.org/
Neglected Tropical Diseases
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglected_tropical_diseases
Peter J Hotez and the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases discuss integrated control measures for NTDs.
http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2014/05/13/integrated-neglected-tropical-disease-ntd-control-early-years/
The derogatory term 'White Trash"
and how African slaves brought the hookworm with them.
From the book "PARASITES" by Rosemarie Drisdelle:
Whites in the South caught hookworm from African slaves. The weakness caused by this disease gave rise to the characterization of southern whites as "white trash". The main symptoms of chronic hookworm disease are those of anemia and protein deficiency, both results of intestinal blood loss. Hookworm infections can involve thousands of worms, and the bleeding is profoundly damaging over time, especially when the infected person's diet is poor.
Read more
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-hookworm-parasite-key-to-why-south.htmlRead more
The 17 neglected tropical diseases
The neglected tropical diseases result from four different causative pathogens:Virus
Protozoa
Helminth
- Cysticercosis/Taeniasis
- Dracunculiasis (guinea-worm disease)
- Echinococcosis
- Foodborne trematodiases
- Lymphatic filariasis
- Onchocerciasis (river blindness)
- Schistosomiasis
- Soil-transmitted helminthiases
Bacteria
Other neglected conditions:
Source - http://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/diseases/en/
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