Skip to main content
Search

Introduction to neglected tropical diseases

Published on May 30, 2019   51 min

HSTalks is pleased to grant unrestricted complimentary access to all lectures in the series Neglected Tropical Diseases. Persons not at a subscribing institution should sign up for a personal account.

Other Talks in the Series: Neglected Tropical Diseases

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
My name is Professor David Molyneux. I'm an honorary professor in the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and my topic is to introduce the community to the neglected tropical diseases and show the issues around health, poverty, and development, which the diseases called the neglected tropical diseases entail.
0:24
This journey started some 19 years ago, associated with the development of the Millennium Development Goals and the establishment of the Global Fund, which was designed to support the... addressing the major issues of HIV, TB, and malaria. The focus on those diseases led me to develop this slide with a colleague, which essentially showed the total focus of the infectious disease community on those three infections, essentially ignoring what we believed were other infections which afflicted so many millions, probably two billion on the planet. So the neglected tropical diseases movement was born.
1:10
Now, some four or five years ago at a meeting in London, WHO said we're looking at an epidemic of neglected tropical diseases. I beg to differ and the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton took out my idea that in fact, neglected tropical diseases were a global pandemic because of the numbers of people who are infected by these conditions, and the extent of the infection across the planet. So in 2017, we published this review article in the Lancet, using the term 'chronic pandemic' to express the extraordinary extent to which these infections affect so many millions if not a billion people despite progress has been made over the last few years.