Neglected Tropical Diseases

Description

Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) programs seek to eliminate NTDs, a group of parasitic, bacterial, and viral diseases that disproportionately affect poor and marginalized populations. NTDs can often be debilitating, stigmatizing, and cause life-long disability. However, some are also preventable and treatable. USAID targets the most prevalent NTDs, addressing elephantiasis, blinding trachoma, river blindness, snail fever, hookworm, and roundworm.

Use of Funds

Funds prioritize country-led, sustainable programming, such as mapping disease-endemic areas, delivering safe and effective medicines, strengthening surveillance, and advancing life-saving research. NTD funding helps distribute treatment and supports countries’ efforts to plan, implement, and finance efforts to end NTDs.

Justification

• Over 1 billion people are impacted by NTDs (1 in 5 people globally), resulting in blindness, malnutrition, and other widespread physical disabilities which disproportionately affect impoverished areas and often impacts women and children.
• USAID’s NTD program has leveraged more than $28.6 billion in donated medicines, giving 5 billion people access to NTD treatments.
• 10 USAID-supported countries have eliminated at least one NTD as a public health problem.
• According to the World Health Organization, “investment in tackling NTDs is synonymous with investing in equity and in equitable access to health care…strengthening the systems by which the world’s poorest are able to access health care is, by definition, a contribution to strengthening community and country-level responses both to specific diseases and to generalized ill health.”