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The Neglected Tropical Diseases of Latin America and the Caribbean: A Review of Disease Burden and Distribution and a Roadmap for Control and Elimination

2 Oct 2008

Paul Chinnock

Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (see original article)

Citation: Hotez PJ, Bottazzi ME, Franco-Paredes C, Ault SK, Periago MR (2008) The Neglected Tropical Diseases of Latin America and the Caribbean: A Review of Disease Burden and Distribution and a Roadmap for Control and Elimination. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 2(9): e300.

2008 Hotez et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are common infections in the Latin American and Caribbean region (LAC). However, according to Peter Hotez and colleagues, they are largely forgotten.

In this review in PLoS NTDs, the authors rank individual NTDs in order of the number of people estimated to be infected in LAC countries. Trichuriasis tops the list with 100 million people infected. It is followed by ascariasis (84m), hookworm (50m), Chagas’ disease (8-9m) and schistosomiasis (1.8m). In terms of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), the estimated combined burden due to NTDs in LAC countries is somewhere in the range 1.4 to 5.0 million. This compares with HIV/AIDS (3.2m) and tuberculosis (0.9m). For some NTDs reliable estimates of the burden are simply not available

Those most at risk of infection with NTDs are the poor and people of indigenous or African origin. This, the authors argue, explains why they receive such little attention.

The review discusses approaches to the control or elimination of these diseases and the challenges that must be overcome. For some NTDs, for example schistosomiasis, the prospects of elimination are good. However, for the highest disease burden NTDs – such as Chagas disease, soil-transmitted helminth infections, and hookworm – much remains to be done.

Ultimately, the authors conclude, ‘...the roadmap for the control and elimination of the more widespread NTDs will require an intersectoral approach that bridges public health, social services, and environmental interventions.’