How to Cure one Billion People

This item is hardly news.  However, with a new year about to begin it is worth the reminder.  In my lifetime, the fundamental problem was the simple lack of trained or even trainable personnel.  Thus solutions went unused or simply not communicated.

 

Today the communication problem is either resolved or will be shortly thanks to the penetration of the cell phone.  Life saving information is available.  Importantly, over the past two generations, children everywhere are getting a basic education, and those not have family who is.  Therefore the heart of the historic problem of health care delivery has or is been solved.

 

What is left to do is programmed delivery. We have had plenty of practice and core infrastructure exists to be exploited.  What is left is simple funding to push product into the pipeline.  Establishing a global program of disease eradication through community participation that puts it on record that it is a permanent system that will never end even when all diseases are cured because childhood care is also part of such a program.

 

Funding is not a problem unless governments make it a problem. 

 

The role of government is to invest in and capitalize their citizens.  Ridding the population of disease has an immediate short term return in human energy and tax revenues. Providing an education has a longer term payoff.  It cost perhaps several thousands of dollars to educate a professional back in the sixties.  That was recaptured in a decade from the beneficiary.  That professional immediately went to the top third of earners and tax payers and that was sustained to this day when he may actually retire.  Without the original investment by government that same individual would have pulled in possible a tenth of the tax revenue.

 

This is so obvious that I wonder how any government can fail to get it right.  Even the communists got the formula right.  Their error was to then tie their citizen’s hands.  Cuba is a glowing example waiting for human liberation.

 

In the event, this is an excellent call to action that should be taken up be the UN and integrated with everyone now trying to help.

What we need to do is to link the distribution directly to cell phone subscribers. Have the subscriber designate a health care provider (witch doctors included) to whom medicines can dispatched.  The subscriber then takes responsibility for his family and the agency can use the provider to confirm the administration by merely using the patient's cell phone to report.  Since a number of programs need to be run, this creates a virtuous circle of responsibility that also repeats and reinforces.

 

How to Cure 1 Billion People?--Defeat Neglected Tropical Diseases

 

The poorest people are not only poor. They are also chronically sick, making it harder for them to escape poverty. A new global initiative may break the vicious cycle

By Peter Jay Hotez   

 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-plan-to-defeat-neglected-tropical-diseases&sc=DD_20091221

http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/a-plan-to-defeat-neglected-tropical-diseases_1.jpg

One tablet of ivermectin per year is enough to protect against river blindness. Health workers in the Ivory Coast have been battling a resurgence of the disease.

 

 

Key Concepts

A group of seven tropical diseases, mostly caused by parasitic worms, afflict a billion impoverished people worldwide. They seldom kill directly but cause lifelong misery that stunts children’s growth, leaves adults unable to function to their fullest, and heightens the risk of other diseases.

Fortunately, they can be easily treated, often with a single pill. Various agencies and foundations are collaborating to deliver these drugs, although they have reached only about 10 percent of the population so far.

The U.S. has its own neglected parasitic diseases that affect millions of rural and urban poor.

In the north of Burkina Faso, not far to the east of one of the best-known backpacker destinations in West Africa, the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, lies the town of Koumbri. It was one of the places where the Burkina Ministry of Health began a mass campaign five years ago to treat parasitic worms. One of the beneficiaries, Aboubacar, then an eight-year-old boy, told health workers he felt perpetually tired and ill and had noticed blood in his urine. After taking a few pills, he felt better, started to play soccer again, and began focusing on his schoolwork and doing better academically.

The Burkina Faso program, which treated more than two million children, was both a success story and an emblem of the tragedy of disease in the developing world. For want of very simple treatments, a billion people in the world wake up every day of their lives feeling sick. As a result they cannot learn in school or work effectively.

Most people in richer countries equate tropical disease with the big three—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis andmalaria—and funding agencies allocate aid accordingly. Yet a group of conditions known collectively as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has an even more widespread impact. They may not often kill, but they debilitate by causing severe anemia, malnutrition, delays in intellectual and cognitive development, and blindness. They can lead to horrific limb and genital disfigurement and skin deformities and increase the risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS and suffering complications during pregnancy. They not only result from poverty but also help to perpetuate it. Children cannot develop to their full potential, and adult workers are not as productive as they could be.

Such diseases are not confined to developing nations. I estimate that millions of Americans living in poverty also suffer from NTD-like infections. Parasitic diseases such as cysticercosis, Chagas disease, trichomoniasis and toxocariasis occur with high frequency in our inner cities, post-Katrina Louisiana, other parts of the Mississippi Delta, the border region with Mexico, and Appalachia.

NTDs have plagued humankind for thousands of years. Historians have found accurate descriptions of many of them in ancient texts as diverse as the Bible, the Talmud, the Vedas, the writings of Hippocrates, and Egyptian papyri. What is new, however, is that donors, drugmakers, health ministries in low- and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization (WHO), and public-private partnerships are linking their efforts to combat the NTDs in a more coordinated and systematic way. Over the past half a decade the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Dubai-based sustainable development fund Legatum, and the U.S. and British governments have committed serious money, while major pharmaceutical companies have donated urgently needed NTD drugs. But the battle has only begun.

Like Leeches in Your Gut

The scale and extent of the global NTD problem are hard to take in. Almost every destitute person living in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America is infected with one or more of these diseases. The illnesses last years, decades and often even a lifetime. The seven most common NTDs have the most devastating impact.

Three of them are caused by parasitic worms, also known as helminths, that live in the intestines. The large common roundworm, which results in ascariasis, afflicts 800 million people and the whipworm, which results in trichuriasis, 600 million people. These helminths rob children of nutrients, stunting their growth. Even worse are hookworms, which are found in 600 million people. These half-inch-long worms attach to the inside of the small intestine and suck blood, like an internal leech. Over a period of months or years they produce severe iron-deficiency anemia and protein malnutrition. Children with chronic hookworm anemia take on a sickly and sallow complexion and have trouble learning in school. More than 40 million pregnant women are also infected with hookworm, rendering them vulnerable to malaria or additional blood losses in childbirth. Their babies are born with low birth weights [see “Hookworm Infection,” by Peter J. Hotez and David I. Pritchard; Scientific American, June 1995].