What’s a metre (three feet) long, grows inside people, and can release millions of eggs? No, it’s not the Easter Bunny (come on!), but I’ll forgive you if you don’t know. The answer is a Guinea worm, an infectious parasite that was inside 3.5 million people in tropical parts of the world back in 1986. The reason why you probably haven’t heard of it is because it’s considered to be a “Neglected Tropical Disease”, or NTD.

The worm passes its larvae onto new hosts via contaminated water, spending a year growing inside a human body before bursting out in a very painful and infection-causing manner. It can render people unable to work, and can do permanent damage to legs and joints. The way to stop Guinea worm in its tracks is by only drinking clean filtered water, but this is easier said than done for many people in extreme poverty. Tremendous progress is happening, though – only 126 cases of Guinea worm were reported worldwide in 2014.

Guinea worm is one of 17 NTDs that the World Health Organization (WHO) featured in its landmark 2012 report called “Accelerating Work to Overcome the Global Impact of Neglected Tropical Diseases”. It’s not a snappy title for a report, but it does a pretty good job of explaining the aim. Other examples from this list of 17 that you’re very unlikely to hear about in the newspaper are things like Chagas disease, human African trypanosomiasis, leprosy, lymphatic filariasis (aka “elephantiasis”), onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis (aka “snail fever”), soil-transmitted helminths, and visceral leishmaniasis. See… neglected. But they all matter, because tropical diseases are interrupting the lives of people trying to work their way out of poverty in some of the world’s poorest countries.

So the WHO’s report was a good one, and became the roadmap for controlling, eliminating, or eradicating the 17 diseases by 2020. Since then, a coalition of global health/development organisations and industry partners (such as Novartis, USAID, Sightsavers, The World Bank, UK aid, World Vision, and dozens more) have been tracking the progress on 10 of the key NTDs, and releasing an annual update report to help to focus the efforts of all of the different organisations, and provide a broader update to everyone else. The 2015 update has been unveiled today, so let’s take a peek to see how things are going. I take the word “neglected” as a bit of a challenge… talking about neglected things makes me feel like a rebel.

Image: Marcus Perkins

Highlights from the update report

# The last 12 months saw significant increases in country ownership of NTD programs. This means that it’s now less about foreign organisations creating and executing plans, and more about individual countries taking charge of responding to their own challenges. Countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines are leading the way on this. To date, 26 African countries have signed on to a commitment to push harder on this. Good!

# Currently, pharmaceutical companies donate drugs worth nearly US$3.8 billion per year. This generosity is making this whole dream affordable, and it’s saving lives. The companies have pledged a further $17.8 billion worth between 2014 and 2020. This deserves more recognition, in my opinion.

# As I mentioned, there’s actually a good supply of donated drugs to combat these diseases. The weak link at the moment is the distribution – having a reliable system to get the medications out to the remote, impoverished communities that need them. It’s estimated that there’s a $200-300 million annual funding gap over the next few years for creating these distribution systems.

# This big effort is working. There are dozens of examples of Neglected Tropical diseases being wiped out from entire countries (for example, onchocerciasis was eliminated in Colombia and Ecuador and trachoma was eliminated in Oman). It’s a tremendous achievement.

# The report concludes that eliminating the 10 diseases covered in the update report is “an achievable objective for this generation”.


Where do we go from here?

Progress is lagging on some of the individual disease eradication plans outlined in the WHO’s 2012 report, but overall the improvements are very encouraging. The combined efforts of governments, corporate partners, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies, and health systems are creating genuine change.

Wiping out Neglected Tropical Diseases isn’t sexy. There’s no catchy hashtag to use for onchocerciasis, I’m pretty sure there’s no ice bucket challenge for soil-transmitted helminths, and your friends probably don’t know that human African trypanosomiasis even exists (unless you were to, erm, share this article on social media). But this sort of obstacle facing some of the world’s poorest people really need to be addressed if we’re going to end extreme poverty. It’s as simple as that. You know how hipsters are interested in bands and beers that nobody’s ever heard of? I’m thinking of becoming a hipster of tropical diseases. The more obscure, the more I want to know. That’ll impress the girls down at the vintage vinyl store.

You can get your hands on the full report here, which will give you all the rest of the information that you need.

I'd also like to say...

As a final point of trivia, let me point out that thanks to successful eradication efforts, Guinea worm isn’t even found in the country of Guinea today. I demand a name-change to “Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Mali worm”, or “We don’t actually have this worm in Guinea worm”. If this inspiring work continues, we’ll even be able to change the name to “Worm that nobody anywhere has to deal with, and now they can get on with their lives”. That’s a good name.


Editorial

Defeat Poverty

Exciting progress on wiping out neglected tropical diseases. New report!

By Michael Wilson