Abstract
A New European Neglected Diseases Center for Greece?
Highlights
While today populations who live in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia suffer from the largest public health impact from the world’s neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) [1,2], it is astonishing to some that many of these same diseases disproportionately strike the impoverished populations living in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa
In the Balkans and elsewhere in southeastern Europe, as well as in Turkey, several former Soviet-bloc countries, and among the Roma, today there are high rates of parasitic infections such as echinococcosis, toxocariasis, toxoplasmosis, and trichinellosis, as well as a number of important bacterial infections such as brucellosis and congenital syphilis (Table 1). Many of these NTDs are zoonoses transmitted from animals and linked to breakdowns in veterinary public health, especially in Eastern Europe [3]
A key step to addressing these neglected infections of poverty would include establishing a new center for research in order to conduct fundamental and translational research on the major NTDs affecting areas of poverty in southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa; ideally, these activities might include product development activities for a new generation of neglected disease drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines
Summary
While today populations who live in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia suffer from the largest public health impact from the world’s neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) [1,2], it is astonishing to some that many of these same diseases disproportionately strike the impoverished populations living in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In Europe, a 2011 analysis found surprisingly high rates of NTDs among the more than 150 million Europeans who live below the poverty level [3].
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