Vaccines Against Neglected Tropical Diseases: Promising Interventions to Rescue the Poorest Populations in the Americas

Abstract

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were set forth in the year 2000 by the UN member states to help countries achieve important goals by 2015, including those that would eradicate extreme poverty and hunger (MDG 1) and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases (MDG 6). Great strides have been made to date, and, currently, the UN Development Programme is embarking on a post-2015 development agenda, together with a new set of Sustainable Development Goals [101]. The causes of poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have traditionally been primarily attributed to cycles of economic crises where per capita incomes usually decrease dramatically with commensurate increases in poverty rates [1]. These cycles have contributed to the reduction in the level of opportunities provided by the governments and/or private sectors for access to job security and earnings, education, and health. The World Bank estimates that as of 2010, the approximately 10% of the total LAC population lives on less than US$2 per day [102]. Even though this rate has been halved between 1990 and 2010, the LAC region still has more than 100 million people living in poverty [101,102]. Furthermore, the recent estimates from the USA also indicate that, today, there are more than 1.5 million American families living in extreme poverty [2]. A recent article in Foreign Policy highlights that beyond just cycles of economic crisis and/or lack of education, the cycle of poverty derives from the fact that most of these underserved and poor populations are afflicted by the so-called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), “the diseases you’ve never heard of” [3]. It is interesting that even though MDG 6 specifically refers to the efforts to combat these ‘other diseases,’ a close look at the MDG 2013 report does not highlight any of the efforts towards the control of these NTDs [101].