There's been a lot of progress with visceral leishmaniases, which is a different disease, but which kills.

Dirk Engels

Categorized in : Health News

We thought we would have been a lot further with Yaws, and that is basically because we don't have the medicines donated as we do with other diseases.

Cutaneous leishmaniases doesn't kill, but it disfigures, so here we could do a lot more and the main problem here is also access to medicines -- access to affordable medicines.

For the moment, we're only tackling two: through blood transfusion and vector transmission, there are still gaps.

There's also a group of diseases that you can actually treat prev... by Dirk Engels

There's also a group of diseases that you can actually treat preventatively.

So for diseases like elephantiasis, Guinea worm disease, schistosomiasis, the intestinal worms and trachoma, you can regularly treat people with safe, single dose drugs and then they never actually build up a worm load that could cause them problems.

What has contributed enormously to that progress was the help we have received from the private sector.

Here we're counting a lot on the new development framework. by Dirk Engels

Here we're counting a lot on the new development framework.

Dengue is one of the diseases we haven't been so successful in tackling or curbing, we don't have easy tools to curb the spread of Dengue.

Endemic countries can play their part, some endemic countries are fast developing, and as they move up the ladder they also have more means to pay for tackling NTDs.

Ebola has shown that when there is real urgency, something can be done (by foreign donors and pharmaceutical companies), but it's also shown that maybe we shouldn't wait until it is urgent.