Tag Archives: Inter-American Development Bank

Water and Sanitation to tackle NTDs in Latin America and the Caribbean – the IDB perspective Part 2

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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.

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Chiapas Receives 5.5 Million Pesos for the Elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases

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Press Release from Inter-American Development Bank:

More than 132,000 people will benefit from a program Inter-American Development Bank(IDB), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the Sabin Vaccine Institute (SVI) signed with the State of Chiapas to combat some of the worst infectious diseases.

The Chiapas State Government will fight tropical diseases such as trachoma and helminthiasis with $312,000 donated by the institutions and their local counterpart. FEMSA Foundation has also joined this effort and donated $137,520 to the State of Chiapas.

The program endeavors to reduce morbidity and help raise the index of human development in the Southern-most state of Mexico. It plans to ensure compliance with international commitments such as the elimination of onchocerciasis, trachoma, rabies transmitted by dogs, control of diseases like Chagas disease and leishmaniasis, as well as prevention from soil-transmitted helminthiasis. These diseases have detrimental social impacts that include low work productivity and social occlusion.

The agreement on the donation was signed on February 15, 2011. The first project under the initiative to combat tropical diseases will be held in the five trachoma-endemic municipalities of Chiapas: San Juan Cancuc, Oxchuc, Tenejapa, Huixtan and Chanal. This pilot project aims to show how comprehensive and well designed projects can achieve elimination and control of these diseases.

The agreement was signed by the state authorities of Chiapas, State Governor Lic. Juan Sabines Guerrero, the Health Secretary, Dr. James Gomez Montes, the IDB representative in Mexico, Mr. Ellis Juan, the Managing Director of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, Dr. Neeraj Mistry, the Director of FEMSA Foundation, Mr. Vidal Garza, and Dr. Humberto Montiel, representing the Pan American Health Organization. Being witnessed by Dr. Margarita Aguilar, PAHO representative in Chiapas.

This first demonstration project will also receive additional resources from the state government to provide clean water and basic sanitation to municipalities. The program’s objective is to demonstrate reproducibility in any Latin American country, which will positively impact human and social development in the region.

To learn more click here!