adminMs Wangechi Thuo, from the Global Network for Neglected Diseases.
Sadly, an estimated one billion people, mostly those who are poor and cannot afford basic health services, healthy diets and live with limited water and other sanitary facilities in Africa, are at risk of suffering from any of these diseases, which cost just 50 cents to treat.
NTDs are a group of infectious diseases that are endemic in a number of developing countries including Africa.
They are usually associated with heat and humidity in tropical settings as well as poverty and illiteracy. Most of the diseases are transmitted by mosquitoes, black flies, sand flies, tsetse flies and snails. A few are transmitted through water and soils.
In Africa, there are 17 identified NTDs which, include rabies, bilharzia, sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, hookworm, whipworm and roundworm.
Ms Thuo said although it just cost 50 cents to treat an NTD, less than 35 percent of the global need is being met.
She said supply of treatments still lags behind yet populations at risk continue to increase.
“Funding has almost doubled from just three years ago and almost 10-fold since 2000. However, it is still only 1 percent of the funding to HIV and Aids, tuberculosis and malaria,” Ms Thuo said.
In Zimbabwe, and elsewhere in the region, the magnitude of the majority of these diseases is not known, manufacturing of drugs that treat these diseases is limited, and in some cases there are little or no interventions to address these conditions, hence the blanket term — Neglected Tropical Diseases.
“There are tools available that can be put into place to control NTDs,” said World Health Organisation disease prevention and control officer in Zimbabwe Dr Lincoln Charimari.
Dr Charimari said WHO recommends countries to intensify control and treatment of the diseases through provision of safe water and sanitation to vulnerable communities and improving on veterinary health.
“WHO has strategies in place for the control and treatment of NTDs. They just need to be implemented,” he said.
Dr Charimari added that the burden of NTDs in the region is more than that of malaria and tuberculosis.
Ministry of Health and Child Welfare disease prevention and control director Dr Portia Manangazira said in line with WHO resolutions to bring back NTDs back on the agenda, Zimbabwe has come up with a plan meant to ensure that all NTDs are responded to as a priority public health issue.
Expected to run between 2012 and 2016, Dr Manangazira said one of Government’s targets in the plan is to achieve a 100 percent mass drug administration coverage to communities at risk of these diseases.
“In 2012, Zimbabwe managed to carry out a mass drug administration campaign covering bilharzia and worms. This campaign was supported by WHO which provided the drugs for the communities,” said Dr Manangazira.
She said Government is mulling a similar campaign in 2013 to further reduce the prevalence of bilharzia and worms especially in children.
She said according to a survey conducted by Government in 2010, the prevalence of bilharzia stood at about 52 percent at district level and for worms it was about 27 percent.
“In 2013, Government intends to carry out surveys for the prevalence of elephantiasis and sleeping sickness,” Dr Manangazira said.
“Kids get these diseases by doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing: playing in rivers, helping with laundry, or drinking unsafe water. NTDs are the reason why families in Africa, Latin America and South Asia cannot escape poverty since they keep children from going to school and parents from working.
“They drive home the simplest truth that basic health builds the foundation for poor communities to prosper,” says South Africa’s Medecins Sans Frontieres communications manager Mr Borrie La Grange.
MSF has more than 20 years involved in management of NTDs in 65 countries in the world. Mr La Grange said to effectively tackle NTDs, governments should integrate diagnosis and treatment of the diseases into a basic health system to increase on coverage and sustainability.
On the other hand, he urged pharmaceutical companies to come up with simple but effective short course treatments for the diseases.
Mr La Grange said tackling NTDs will go a long way in achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals whose targets are for 2015.
“All the talk about ambitious goals and elimination will not make a difference unless we put our full support behind national control programmes and national health systems in countries where the disease is endemic,” he said.
Addressing the 65th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier in May this year, WHO director-general Dr Margaret Chan said her organisation will be administering drugs for worms pledged by a leading pharmaceutical to Africa until 2016.
Dr Chan said with that pledge, WHO is now in a position to protect all school-going children in Africa, at risk of worms infection.
“We can blanket this part of the world with medicines that rid every schoolchild of worms and eggs, parasites that interfere with their learning, impair cognitive development and compromise their nutritional status,” said Dr Chan.
According to WHO, strategies in place combined with drugs, effective service delivery, vigilant education on hygiene and sanitation, the region could effectively reduce transmission of NTDs.
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