ADRIAN MA, HOST:
A global effort to stamp out certain undertreated diseases is making progress. As º£½ÇÉçÇø's Nurith Aizenman reports, countries are making strides in combating what global health officials call neglected tropical diseases.
NURITH AIZENMAN, BYLINE: Dr. Albis Gabrielli is a top official in the World Health Organization's program for these diseases. And he stresses that the fact that for decades they'd been neglected doesn't mean they're obscure.
ALBIS GABRIELLI: We calculate that approximately 1 billion people are affected, so a significant proportion of the global population.
AIZENMAN: The trouble is the people who contract these diseases have historically been among the world's lowest-income citizens, living in some of the world's lowest-resourced nations.
GABRIELLI: People with no voice, living in poverty in remote rural areas, and therefore the diseases are not, let's say, prioritized.
AIZENMAN: By governments, by donors and by private pharmaceutical companies who don't stand to make as much of a profit addressing them. But in the early 2000s, the WHO and other global health partners came up with a plan to change that dynamic. They created an official list of 20 neglected tropical diseases to target with international research and cooperation. This year, the effort hit a major milestone. Iraq became the 50th nation in the world to eliminate the threat from at least one of the diseases on the list by stamping out a bacterial infection called trachoma. And it came just after two other nations, Benin and Mali, also stopped trachoma spread. Dr. Gabrielli says that's a major achievement.
GABRIELLI: It's one of the leading causes of preventable blindness in many parts of the world.
AIZENMAN: The disease can be transmitted when flies land on an infected person's eyes and nose, coming into contact with contaminated discharge, then spreading it on. So Dr. Gabrielli says a key strategy was to administer antibiotics en masse to practically everyone in areas where trachoma was endemic.
GABRIELLI: If you treat thousands of people at the same time, you decrease transmission rate in the environment in the area where these people live.
AIZENMAN: Another huge victory? Bangladesh became the first country to end the threat from not one, but two neglected tropical diseases in the same year, including a deadly illness that no other afflicted country has managed to beat. It's called visceral leishmaniasis, caused by a parasite that's spread through the bite of the sandfly.
Dr. Dinesh Mondal is a Bangladeshi research scientist. He recalls the scenes in the mid-2000s, when he first started working with the government to combat this disease.
DINESH MONDAL: I have seen hospitals full of patients. If you see, you know how patients are suffering. It was miserable.
AIZENMAN: The parasite attacks a person's liver, their spleen, causing their abdomens to swell.
MONDAL: Really very shocking pictures.
AIZENMAN: And the only treatment...
MONDAL: Which was a very painful injection.
AIZENMAN: ...That had to be administered 30 times. But as a result of the new focus on visceral leishmaniasis, scientists realized something - a one-shot treatment with an antifungal drug originally developed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company for cancer and HIV patients might also be worth trying against visceral leishmaniasis. Mondal, who's with the research institute ICDDR,B, assisted with testing it on a man in his 30s whose doctors had practically left him for dead.
MONDAL: It was amazing. Within three days, he was feeling so good.
AIZENMAN: WHO officials then helped negotiate a deal to drastically reduce the price of the drug in low-income countries. For all the progress, this year, the WHO added a new entry to the neglected tropical disease list, a gangrenous illness called Noma that mostly afflicts malnourished young children. Meanwhile, Mondal is concerned that Bangladesh's success with visceral leishmaniasis has led to a drop in international funding to ensure the disease doesn't return. He says there's still a lot to do.
Nurith Aizenman, º£½ÇÉçÇø News. Transcript provided by º£½ÇÉçÇø, Copyright º£½ÇÉçÇø.
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