The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is a source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). IDB aims to bring about development and reduce poverty in a sustainable, climate-friendly way. IDB (along with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)) is also one of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases’ partners in the NTD Latin America and the Caribbean Initiative, which helps support programs that address NTDs in the LAC region. IDB will be joining us at our World Water Week event this Wednesday August 24 as well. Below is Part 1 of a two part series on NTDs in Latin America and the Caribbean, and how water and sanitation affect these diseases:
By: Josh Colston, Inter-American Development Bank, Social Sector
The NTD situation in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is unique. While in other regions, NTDs can be widespread across large areas; in LAC, the distribution of many NTDs is concentrated in small niches – stubborn pockets of transmission where the conditions are just right for the diseases to survive, continuing to infect people and resisting attempts to eliminate them.
One such condition is a lack of water and sanitation. A common feature of these small pockets – whose populations may only number in the 100,000s – is that they are often places where it is difficult to provide the local people with clean piped water and decent latrines that can dispose of their “waste” in a hygienic way. In urban areas, such as the city of Recife on the easternmost tip of Brazil, the last place in that country where the disfiguring disease of lymphatic filariasis (LF) continues to infect people, this lack of access may be due to rapid urbanization outstripping the capacity to meet the demand for water and sanitation services. Elsewhere, in the mountains of central Chiapas, the last bastion of blinding trachoma in Mexico, for example, it is because the indigenous, non-Spanish speaking population lives in small, dispersed settlements that are difficult to access.
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