The changing global landscape of health and disease: addressing challenges and opportunities for sustaining progress towards control and elimination of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)

Abstract

The drive to control neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has had many successes but to reach defined targets new approaches are required. Over the last decade, NTD control programmes have benefitted from increased resources, and from effective partnerships and long-term pharmaceutical donations. Although the NTD agenda is broader than those diseases of parasitic aetiology there has been a massive up-scaling of the delivery of medicines to some billion people annually. Recipients are often the poorest, with the aspiration that NTD programmes are key to universal health coverage as reflected within the 2030 United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). To reach elimination targets, the community will need to adapt global events and changing policy environments to ensure programmes are responsive and can sustain progress towards NTD targets. Innovative thinking embedded within regional and national health systems is needed. Policy makers, managers and frontline health workers are the mediators between challenge and change at global and local levels. This paper attempts to address the challenges to end the chronic pandemic of NTDs and achieve the SDG targets. It concludes with a conceptual framework that illustrates the interactions between these key challenges and opportunities and emphasizes the health system as a critical mediator.

The process of building the priority of neglected tropical diseases: A global policy analysis

“…The diversity of areas of expertise and focus of actors in the NTD community is one of the reasons for which partnerships are particularly valued. This community engages in public-private partnerships, product development partnerships, and private-private partnerships [30,34,35]. This shows and was confirmed during the interviews, that there is some cohesion among actors of the NTD community and that it has improved over the years, particularly among actors from the same category (e.g.…”

“…The external portrayal of NTDs as a problem by the NTD community is also aligned with the global health agenda; this is seen for example in references to primary health care (PHC) [4,10,44], universal health care (UHC) [4,10,30,35,44], and health systems strengthening [13,35,47]. The latter was frequently mentioned by some of the actors interviewed.…”

“…The latter was frequently mentioned by some of the actors interviewed. Consistency between the UHC targets with those of NTDs has been postulated in global documents, including in WHA 66.12 on NTDs [52], and in academic publications [23,35]. NTD control and elimination has been suggested to be a "litmus test" or a measure for success of UHC in reaching the most vulnerable, this was repeatedly postulated in the 3 rd WHO report on NTDs [44].…”

Advancing the multi-disciplinarity of parasitology within the British Society for Parasitology: studies of host–parasite evolution in an ever-changing world

“…In this light, the drive towards interruption of parasite transmission and disease elimination is important, but requires more careful orchestration of available resources within the health system. Molyneux et al (2018) provided a thought-provoking review which considers the perspectives of policy makers, managers and frontline health workers and how their actions should be better integrated or harmonized on each of their targeted diseases (Molyneux et al, 2018). A good example of the progress being waged against urogenital schistosomiasis in Cameroon is provided by Tchuem .…”

Social marketing interventions for the prevention and control of neglected tropical diseases: A systematic review

“…NTDs pose a challenge for the health, social, and economic development of countries [5,7]. These challenges are exacerbated by changes in the global landscape, such as climate change, conflicts, migration, and urbanization processes [6,[8][9][10].…”