Miller Mccune: Millions of poor Americans living in distressed regions of the country are chronically sick, afflicted by a host of hidden diseases that are not being monitored, diagnosed or treated, researchers say.
Most of the diseases named in the legislation have not been surveyed in the U.S. for decades, if ever. None are tracked by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though between 4 million and 10 million Americans could be infected, Hotez said. Drugs are available to treat a number of the neglected diseases, he said, but doctors are not trained to diagnose them.
"These are not even rare diseases," Hotez said. "Yet there's so little research on them, we don't know the full extent of their impact, how they are transmitted, or how they contribute to disability. We do not have good diagnostic methods. We can't even begin to think about controlling these diseases."
The website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists six "major neglected infections of poverty" in the U.S., all of them parasitic or viral diseases, and notes that they can cause birth defects, epilepsy, hearing loss, infertility, blindness and heart failure. The site says that improved tracking, testing and treatment is needed to reduce illness and death.
...If the Senate passes the new bill, the CDC will conduct a review of existing data on the neglected diseases and try to identify the information gaps, Montgomery said.According to a report by Families USA, the National Institutes of Health in 2007 accounted for 76 percent of $376 million in U.S. government spending for research on eight globally neglected diseases, including three that afflict hundreds of thousands of Americans — Chagas disease, dengue fever, which can be fatal, and leishmaniasis, a centuries-old disease that produces skin ulcers. Tuberculosis and malaria received nearly three-quarters of the funds. (And the private market sees more opportunity in battling the scourge of baldness.) Overall, the Families USA report said, NIH funding for the eight diseases represented less than 1 percent of the agency's total research budget of $29 billion.
"These are truly neglected problems," he said. "People have these diseases for years, and during this time, they promote poverty. They interfere with child growth and development and, in some cases, impair intelligence and cognition. They affect pregnancy outcomes and are co-factors in the AIDS epidemic."
As reported in Miller Mccune, Hotez has previously challenged both drug makers and policymakers to divert more funding to the neglected diseases of poverty in the developing world.
"They have no advocacy," he said. "It's been very frustrating."
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