Below is the second and last installment of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)’s series for World 
Water Week. In this entry, Josh Colston talks about the water and sanitation projects in Latin American and the Caribbean supported by IDB.
By: Josh Colston, Inter-American Development Bank, Social Sector
The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) NTD Initiative is a partnership between the IDB, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases. As the regional development bank for LAC, with projects in many different sectors, one of the things that the IDB brings to the partnership is the ability to facilitate this integration. We can collaborate with our colleagues in different departments, whose projects tackle NTD risk factors to include effective, low cost public health activities within their projects.
A good example of this is a project in Guyana’s capital city of Georgetown. Georgetown has a poor drainage system consisting of basic trenches, running alongside the roads. Lying close to sea level, the city is prone to severe and prolonged flooding during the rainy season, while the aging sewerage system regularly leaks. These problems cause wastewater to overflow into the drainage trenches and back-up into the streets and backyards. This in turn causes populations of mosquitoes – a vector for lymphatic filariasis (LF) – and soil-transmitted helminths (STH) transmission to rise. The water and sanitation division of the IDB has a project to improve the city’s sewerage system. Our NTD Initiative has therefore seized the opportunity to add a health component to this project. In this way, we are uniquely placed to bring together medical interventions with longer-term environmental improvements that will have a combined impact on the two diseases.
Happily, another way in which LAC is unique is that the elimination of several NTDs – Trachoma, Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic Filariasis among them – is a genuinely feasible goal in the short term. With this multi-sectoral approach, the IDB and its partners are going to play a small role in achieving this goal. But when it is reached, the real credit will have to go to the countries themselves – the governments, health workers and communities that made the final push to end the neglect, and rid the region of these major causes of disability, social-exclusion and unhappiness.
Josh Colston is a consultant in demography and epidemiology at the IDB, where he works on issues such as infectious diseases of poverty, maternal and child health and nutrition, and climate change and health.
Next week August 21-27 marks 
