By: Alanna Shaikh
Yesterday, the Guardian Observer ran an interesting article that looked at global priorities on health funding. They faulted donors for spending too much money on HIV, and not enough on NTDs and diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans.
I don’t believe in pitting health problems against each other for funding, so the HIV argument in the article didn’t do much for me. HIV is a global scourge, and I am for one not going to complain about efforts to combat it[1]. However, they are entirely correct that we need more funding for diseases which are not HIV.
This blog, obviously, advocates for increased support on battling the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). I am not going to recap everything we’ve ever said on this site. We’ll just take it as a given that reducing and eliminating NTDs is a cost-effective public good that everyone should get behind. If you’re not sure, just poke through the archives for a while.
What really struck me as interesting about the Guardian article was the focus on zoonotic diseases – those that transmit from animals to humans. They talk about animals as a reservoir for diseases that damage human health. If we can eliminate these diseases in their animal hosts, we can prevent them from ever infecting humans. It’s extremely efficient, it minimizes human suffering, and it costs less than treating infected people.
The Guardian cites sleeping sickness as their example:
“Scientists have recently found a cheaper way to deal with sleeping sickness: tackling the animals that act as reservoirs for the disease parasite.
“Animals are quite tolerant of the parasite, which exists in several different types,” said Welburn. “Only one type of parasite can infect humans, however, and recently we have developed a blood test to detect it in cattle. It takes only a few hours to spot infected animals.”
Once an infected herd is identified it can be treated with a drug that kills the parasite and costs 30p per animal. Reservoirs of sleeping sickness parasites can be eradicated. “So far we have treated half a million cattle in Uganda and have halted the spread of sleeping sickness,” said Welburn, head of Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy, which tackles neglected diseases.”
They go on to talk about non-zoonotic NTDs and point out stuff we already know – many NTDs are cheaply cured or treated, and we should really have been doing that for years and years now.
The article – at least the animal part – is apparently part of the lead-up to a meeting in Geneva in neglected zoonotic diseases. I can’t find any details about the conference online, although I assume it’s being convened by the WHO. I can offer you something better, though. If you want to learn more about zoonotic diseases and their role in human health, I recommend looking at the resources from the One Health Initiative. It’s a movement of human and animal health care providers to address global health in a unified way. Here’s one article to get you started.
[1] I believe in more pie, not infighting in the global health community. We’re all on the same side here.
Alanna Shaikh is an expert in health consulting, writing about global health for UN Dispatch and about international relief and development at Blood & Milk. She also serves as a frequently contributing blogger to ‘End the Neglect.’ The views and opinions expressed by guest bloggers are not neccesarily the views and opinions of the Global Network. All opinions expressed here are Alanna’s own and not those of any employer or the US government.
