Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases

The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development

Peter J. Hotez

• Publisher: ASM Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781683673897
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Microbiologia

The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are among the most common infections of the world's poorest people and have profound ramifications on affected populations, including physical, mental, social, and economic. This third edition of Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases coincides with the third decade of the NTDs movement, which has given access to essential NTD preventative treatments and medications to more than 1 billion people.

Professor Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, one of the founders of the NTD movement, discusses how the NTD space evolved and control was implemented against these ancient scourges, through alliances between nongovernmental development organizations and private-public partnerships. Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases also

• Reports on the health and economic effects of the NTDs, and the challenges of measuring diseases that do not always kill, but adversely affect productivity, child development, pregnancy outcome, and economic development.
• Lays a roadmap for continued control of existing and newly identified NTDs and spotlights potential opportunities for reducing global poverty and "repairing the world."
• Describes a global initiative to provide annual mass drug administration for more than one billion people affected by NTDs.
• Highlights the role of innovation and product development partnerships for new treatments and vaccines.
• Explains how science and vaccine diplomacy ensure that a new generation of biotechnologies reaches the world's poorest people.

Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases remains an essential resource for anyone seeking insight into global advocacy coordination and mobilization of resources to combat NTDs and continues to tell the story of the world's people who live in extreme poverty and what it means for them to live with these devastating diseases.

"Like Dr. Hotez, I have struggled with how to best get the word out about our need to address NTDs and their link to poverty. Now he has provided us all with a remarkable tool, a book for people without an extensive scientific or medical background. Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases is an excellent 'one-stop' primer about NTDs."—Soledad O'Brien, Host, Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien

1 Introduction to the Neglected Tropical Diseases: the Ancient Afflictions of Stigma and Poverty

The age of hypocrisy has been succeeded by that of indifference, which is worse, for indifference corrupts and appeases: it kills the spirit before it kills the body. It has been stated before, it bears repeating: the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

ELIE WIESEL, A JEW TODAY, P. 17

It is a trite saying that one half the world knows not how the other lives. Who can say what sores might be healed, what hurts solved, were the doings of each half of the world's inhabitants understood and appreciated by the other?

MAHATMA GANDHI

Since the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen unfold a new sense of urgency about the plight of the world's poorest people in developing countries. Today, the average well‐educated layperson living in “the North” (North America, Europe, and Japan) is far more aware than ever before about the suffering of the people living in “the South” (the developing countries of sub‐Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Americas). Almost certainly, the human catastrophe of HIV/AIDS in sub‐Saharan Africa, known as the “plague of the 21st century,” and epidemics or pandemics from Ebola virus and Zika virus infections, and most recently coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19), have helped to focus world attention on health threats from infectious diseases, especially problems in the world's low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs).¹

Simultaneously, an unprecedented and extraordinary advocacy effort led by some highly influential international leaders and celebrities has helped to fuel a 21st‐century global health movement. Throughout the decade of the 2000s, Bono, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Annie Lennox, Bob Geldof, and other actors, celebrities, and musicians; Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim and his family, and other philanthropists; Jeffrey Sachs; Chelsea Clinton; Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom; and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama of the United States have donated their time and energy to advocate for the health of the world's poorest people. These efforts captivated world attention and have even infused an element of glamour into solving global health problems. Between 2005 and 2006 alone, Bono, Bill Gates, and Melinda Gates were named Time magazine Persons of the Year; the Time Global Health Summit in New York was branded the “Woodstock of global health”; Brad Pitt narrated a 6‐hour‐long documentary, Rx for Survival, a Global Health Challenge, for PBS; former President Clinton featured global health issues at his annual Clinton Global Initiative; and Bono and Bobby Shriver launched Product RED to support HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis relief at the 2006 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

As a university professor and now as a dean, I can attest that these activities stimulated an unprecedented level of interest in global health issues from both undergraduates and graduate public health and medical students. With the important exception of our 2020–2021 years of COVID‐19, almost every week during the academic year I have been visited by one or more young persons who request advice on how they can help solve a health problem in an LMIC. I am not the only faculty member to have this experience—today, new university‐wide global health institutes are springing up at Duke, Baylor, Brown, Yale, Vanderbilt, Harvard, Emory, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California campuses, University of Washington, and elsewhere, as university deans and presidents scramble to keep up with student interest.

Like any movement, the one in global health that I benchmark as beginning in 2000 was stimulated by a manifesto, which is defined by Webster as “a public declaration of motives and intentions by a government or by a person or group regarded as having some public importance.”¹ For the global health movement, we can point to at least three landmark 21st‐century policy documents that have effectively served as manifestos.

The first had its origins in January 2000, when then‐World Health Organization (WHO) Director‐General Gro Harlem Brundtland launched the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (CMH) and appointed the international macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs to serve as its chair. Jeff and his colleagues we...