The diseases that affect less developed nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are very similar to those occurring frequently in the poorest people in the United States, especially in women and children. These “neglected infections of poverty” are reported in an analysis published on June 25, 2008 in the open access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Neglected Tropical Disease (NTDs) are largely unknown by Americans, but they are generally considered to be tropical diseases other than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which usually receive more research and support funding. These include diseases caused by parasitic, bacterial, and congenital infections — they are often chronic, debilitating, and can be associated with significant social stigma. In light of this, many of them are either preventable or curable at a symbolic monetary cost. They are commonly considered to affect developing nations, but can affect people living all over the world.
The neglected infections of poverty are NTDs that specifically affect minorities and the impoverished. This includes: syphilis, toxoplasmosis, dengue fever, trichomoniasis, cytomegalovirus (CMV) and many others. It is estimated in this analysis that these infections actually occur in hundreds of thousands of poor Americans. Within the United States, these people are generally concentrated in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, the Mexican borderlands, and the inner cities.
There, they are major causes of chronic disability, impaired childhood development, and adverse outcomes in pregnancy. These outcomes do not just debilitate the individual, but can continue the cycle of poverty by preventing productivity. By preventing many of these diseases, the lives of many people living in these regions could be considerably improved.
The author of the analysis is critical of the way these diseases are addressed in public policy. “The fact that these neglected infections of poverty represent some of the greatest health disparities in the United States, but they remain at the bottom of the public health agenda, is a national disgrace,” says Peter J. Hotez , MD, PhD, President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, Executive Director of Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Walter G. Ross Professor and Chair of the Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine department at George Washington University.
He then calls upon policy makers to make these infections a priority in the public health agenda. “Control of these neglected infections is both a highly cost-effective mechanism for lifting disadvantaged populations out of poverty and consistent with our shared American values of equity and equality,” Hotez says. “We need a national dialogue about these very important, but neglected conditions that afflict the poorest people in the United States. Neglected infections of poverty are understudied and not well known even by physicians and public-health experts. This lack of understanding and knowledge points to the urgent need to increase surveillance for these infections; use cost-effective existing drug control and treatment efforts; implement newborn screenings; and develop new drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines for these infections.”
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PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (http://www.plosntds.org/) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to the pathology, epidemiology, prevention, treatment, and control of the neglected tropical diseases, as well as public policy relevant to this group of diseases. All works published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases are open access, which means that everything is immediately and freely available subject only to the condition that the original authorship and source are properly attributed. The Public Library of Science uses the Creative Commons Attribution License, and copyright is retained by the authors.
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Neglected Infections of Poverty in the United States of America.
Hotez PJ.
PLoS Negl Trop Dis 2(6): e256.
doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000256
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Written by Anna Sophia McKenney