Communicable diseases
- Human African trypanosomiasis: an update
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Sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis, HAT) is fatal if left untreated. It is usually transmitted by insects which are found only in Africa known as the tsetse fly. There is no clear agreement as to how many people have HAT, nor a reliable assessment of the extent of the harm it causes. This brief article in TropIKA.net provides an overall assessment of the disease, its burden on African society and potential treatments.
Over 90 per cent of the world's disease burden occurs in developing countries and most is due to communicable diseases. While chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, are on the rise, communicable disease remains the major challenge. HIV and AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis are important communicable diseases targeted by global control programmes. However, the emphasis on these three epidemics now threatens to undermine efforts of proven efficacy for the control of other diseases that affect developing countries, by diverting attention and resources away from them.
A review of communicable diseases in developing countries is a study in inequity. Children bear the greatest burden. Many of the child survival gains achieved in the 1980s have either stagnated or reversed. Most of those affected come from impoverished settings where they are most likely to be malnourished and least likely to know about life-saving interventions, where to find them, or have the means to obtain them. Traditional values and behaviours untempered by adequate information or meaningful dialogue with the public health community conspire to compound these inequalities. Two diseases - pneumonia and diarrhoea - cause most of the mortality.
The public health community has challenged itself to respond and redress this inequality. The sampled readings in this section of the website outline the dimensions of the challenge, while providing links to additional resources for further information and suggested avenues of collaborative action.
Latest Additions
- Mental health in post-conflict Southern Sudan
- ( B. Roberts / BioMed Central , 2009)
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Sudan’s two decades of civil war, which ended in 2005, involved widespread violence and large-scale forced migration. This had traumatic impacts on the mental health of a large part of the ge...
- The role of civil society organisations in biomedical research
- ( Anant Bhan;Jerome A. Singh;Ross E. G. Upshur / Public Library of Science Medicine , 2007)
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While several publications have addressed the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in social science research in health, their role in biomedical research has not been widely discussed. This ...
- Opportunities for scaling up neglected-disease drug development
- ( Mary Moran / Public Library of Science Medicine , 2005)
- Whereas only 13 new drugs have been developed for neglected tropical diseases since 1975, this paper, published in PLoS Medicine, notes that this is as a result of current perception that these diseas...
- Latrines and surgery as a way of reducing trachoma in Ethiopia and Southern Sudan
- ( P. M. Emerson;L. Rotondo / Community Eye Health Journal , 2009)
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Trachoma is an infectious disease of the eye caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis. Bacteria can spread via an infected person’s hands or clothing and may be carried by flies that hav...
- Eye care interventions in Egypt
- ( A. Mousa;G. Ezz El Arab;E. Rashad / Community Eye Health Journal , 2009)
- In Egypt women are not using eye care services as frequently as men, especially in rural areas. Therefore women in Egypt are more likely than men to suffer from low vision or blindness from avoidable ...
