A new report published by the World Health Organization has revealed "record-breaking progress" in the fight against tropical diseases. Broader poverty issues, however, threaten to stagnate further improvements.
In the past ten years, "unprecedented progress" has
A new report published by the World Health Organization has revealed "record-breaking progress" in the fight against tropical diseases. Broader poverty issues, however, threaten to stagnate further improvements.
In the past ten years, "unprecedented progress" has been made in tackling tropical diseases worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday. To continue targeting invisible killers like Schistosomiasis, however, drug companies, aid organizations and politicians must confront the added challenges created by poverty.
Neglected tropical diseases, also known as NTDs, disfigure and disable millions of people in tropical areas every year. One in six people, mainly from poor communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, suffer from at least one of the 18 listed NTDs annually.
The debilitating effects of these diseases often keep children out of school and adults out of work, perpetuating cycles of poverty.
"There is no group of diseases that is so intimately linked to poverty," said Dr. Dirk Engels, director of WHO's department of control of neglected tropic diseases.
But the "remarkable achievements" made in modern public healthcare over the past decade have seen millions of people "rescued from disability and poverty," said WHO Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan.
Water contaminated by parasites hides life-threatening crippling tropical diseases.
"WHO has observed record-breaking progress towards bringing ancient scourges like sleeping sickness and elephantiasis to their knees," Chan said.
Nearing complete eradication
The global health agency has recorded a dramatic decrease in the number of new cases of some of the worst ailments, including dracunculiasis and trypanosomiasis. The number of people needing treatments has dropped from 2 billion in 2010 to 1.6 billion in 2015.
Only 25 human cases of dracunculiasis, a crippling condition caused by the flesh-burrowing guinea worm, were recorded last year, "putting eradication within reach", WHO said. That's down from nearly 900,000 cases in 1989, when it was endemic in 21 countries.
Without confronting wider poverty-related issues, however, progress could plateau.
An estimated 2.4 billion people still lack basic sanitation facilities like toilets, while nearly two billion people consume water contaminated with fecal matter, significantly increasing their chances of becoming infected by an NTD.
Parasitic flatworms called schistosomes cause Schistosomiasis, an NTD also known as snail fever and bilharzia.
In tropical and sub-tropical areas worldwide, for example, fresh water is sometimes infested with the larvae of parasites known as schistosomes. Once the parasites penetrate human skin, people can become infected by schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzias or "snail fever". But the symptoms of schistosomiasis can take months to surface, slowly causing life-threatening organ damage, including kidney failure, liver fibrosis and bladder cancer.
"They are chronic infections, so you can actually carry these infections for a very long time before you feel really, really sick," says Maurice Odiere from the Kenyan Medical Research Institute KEMRI. "But even when people feel s