Further Details About This Book:
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of diseases with a devastating
impact on people in their prime or younger in endemic areas. Some illnesses are
abrupt in onset and cured relatively easily. Others occur in chronic or subacute
fashion and prove rather difficult to remedy. The impacts are partly linked to
socioeconomic factors; risks of losing a daily job due to treatments, insufficient
drug efficacy further increasing hospitalization necessity or stay duration, medical
expenses, prevalence of fake drugs, folk remedies, and so on. Because these patients
often belong to the lowest economic class, they do not have a stable place to live
and move frequently, and may not retain the same cell phone number, prognostic
surveillance in endemic areas is extremely difficult to conduct.
If a disease has strong infectivity and is life threatening, policy makers must
cope with it immediately and completely. NTDs are not at that threat level and have
been neglected historically. However, the social burden is high because the victims,
often children and the prime generation in each country, become encumbrances.
Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), also known as kala-azar, is a part of the spectrum of
NTDs and combines all the earlier mentioned traits. Many stakeholders have
contributed from the beginning of the twenty-first century in the Indian subcontinent
to reducing the incidence of VL; this goal formed the basis of a memorandum
of understanding shared through WHO with ministers in the countries concerned.
SATREPS, funded by JICA and JST, is one of the first projects stating the necessity
of simple and reliable diagnostic procedures in endemic areas. Ours has been the
only project targeting NTDs from Japan until 2015.
No comments:
Post a Comment