Focus on India in fight against neglected tropical diseases

NAGPUR: Over 1 billion people are affected by one or more tropical disease, and India accounts for 35% of the total global burden. The country is home to 27% people suffering from soil-transmitted helminths (STH) and 40% of people with lymphatic filariasis (LF). It is due to this reason, that Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases is giving special attention to the country. The network, in partnership with Sabin Vaccine Institute, runs an initiative called END7 that aims to eliminate the seven most common neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by 2020. It is the only international advocacy campaign dedicated to raising the awareness, political will and funding towards this end. It also enjoys support from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “The network has been working closely with government officials to scale up all these efforts and to ensure that treatments are being delivered to people in critical need. The key challenge we face is lack of public awareness for NTDs, diseases that are hard to pronounce and disproportionately afflict remote, marginalized communities in developing countries,” said Dr Neeraj Mistry, managing director of Global Network. He feels that Indian government can be a global leader in the fight against NTDs and a role model for neighbouring countries.Commenting on the efforts already made by the government in this direction, Dr Mistry said that a lot of good initiatives have been taken. “India has already eliminated diseases like small pox, guinea worm and yaws because of the efforts by the government and society. To ensure people in even the most remote villages receive essential medicine, a comprehensive, state-by-state programme is being run. The largest lymphatic filariasis elimination programme in the world, reaching approximately 300 million people each year with preventive treatment is being run here. Recently, two of the world’s largest integrated deworming initiatives, aiming to protect 220 million school-age children and 120 million adolescents each year from soil-transmitted helminth infections were also started,” he informed.He said that health activists across the globe wish for all these massive control and elimination programmes to succeed as the experience can give insights to other countries to scale up their own plans. “In a sign indicating that their focus is India, END7 recently appointed Bollywood actor Abhishek Bachchan as its first global ambassador. The campaign has active projects in seven countries in the world, and more countries will be added to it by this year end.”