Abstract
Holidays in the Sun and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Burden of Neglected Tropical Diseases
Highlights
Almost 40 million people live on the islands, islets, and cays that comprise the Caribbean [1]
Of the Western Hemisphere’s 720,000 cases of lymphatic filariasis, a mosquitotransmitted disfiguring parasitic helminth infection caused by Wuchereria bancrofti that can result in elephantiasis, almost 90% of the cases occur in the Caribbean, including 560,000 cases in Haiti and 50,000 in Dominican Republic (DR) [5]
The existence of high rates of lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and hookworm infection in the region is made all the more poignant by an observation made recently in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases that these neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) were most likely introduced into the Caribbean through the Atlantic slave trade [10], and even today such infections still occur almost exclusively among people living in poverty or people of African descent
Summary
Almost 40 million people live on the islands, islets, and cays that comprise the Caribbean [1]. Of the Western Hemisphere’s 720,000 cases of lymphatic filariasis, a mosquitotransmitted disfiguring parasitic helminth infection caused by Wuchereria bancrofti that can result in elephantiasis, almost 90% of the cases occur in the Caribbean, including 560,000 cases in Haiti and 50,000 in DR [5].
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