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Onchocerciasis (River Blindness) 2: control and elimination

Part 2 of 2
Published on January 30, 2020   54 min

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A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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0:00
Hello, this is Adrian Hopkins, we are going to go into the second talk around onchocerciasis or river blindness. In the first part we talked about the actual disease, the vector, the parasites and how we could treat it on an individual basis, and looked forward a little to the fact that we could do mass treatment. Now we are going to move into various ways of controlling the disease in the community, with the possibility of an eventual elimination of the disease. Certainly in some foci it's very close to that in America, and there are some areas in Africa where we've already had some good success.
0:40
The way I thought we would do this would be to look at it from a programme point of view and ask three main questions: firstly, where are we now with our programs? Some of these programmes have been going for years. Secondly, where do we want to be? We had hoped to be stopping treatment everywhere by 2025, that may happen, though it probably won't in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan or in Angola, not because Angola is difficult but because it hasn't got its act together with its treatment strategies yet. Possibly not in the Central African Republic where we had a good programme but constant conflict has been a problem, and in Yemen it's the same, we've had some good planning but the civil war has led to major problems. But we do hope that we will eliminate the transmission of the disease in most areas and we are already celebrating some success, in the Americas four countries have been declared free of the disease. We want to start doing that in Africa, and we should have started in Africa in 2018, I left 2018 on the slide but actually nothing has been done, so we hope to celebrate in 2019, that's where we want to be. Then we have to look at a few principles to answer the third question about how to get there, how do we reach the end game and what do we need to do? We'll look at that under some of the headings that you see on this slide.
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Onchocerciasis (River Blindness) 2: control and elimination

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