Читать книгу Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases - Peter J. Hotez - Страница 5

Dr. Peter Hotez seems a lot like your friendly local doctor when you first meet him. He has these fine, circular glasses, a wide thin smile, and wears hand-tied bow ties with his lab coat. You expect him to pull out a popsicle stick at any moment, squash down your tongue, and implore you to say “Ah.” But Dr. Hotez practices so much more than community medicine. His patients span the globe, and he aspires to bring his mix of human compassion and quality health care to the world’s most vulnerable people, those stricken by the double plague of interrelated poverty and illness.

One way he’s doing this is by educating people about the links between poverty and disease. Dr. Hotez tell us that neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are not only the most common afflictions of the world’s poor but can actually cause poverty, by keeping chronic sufferers from being able to work, study, or care for their families. That includes impoverished farmers with elephantiasis, trachoma, or river blindness, which cost billions of dollars annually in lost agricultural productivity. Also, children stricken by hookworm and other intestinal worm infections that reduce intelligence and the cognitive and reasoning abilities they need to study and eventually work. NTDs are also the most common disease to affect girls and women in developing countries, like schistosomiasis, which renders them more susceptible to acquiring AIDS, or diseases like elephantiasis, leishmaniasis, and Buruli ulcer that disfigure and bring shame and stigma and hinder plans for marriage or children.

NTDs are pervasive in poor communities, in developing countries like Africa and Haiti, but even more disturbingly among the poor living in large middle-income nations—the BRICS countries of Brazil, India, and China for example. I can tell you from my own reporting and travels that disease is also destroying the aspirations of the poor and racial and ethnic minorities in pockets of extreme rural and urban poverty in the United States. Chagas disease, a cause of severe heart disease and death, is widespread in Texas and other southern states both among people and animals. The medicines we have available to treat Chagas disease are too toxic to be given to pregnant women, even though tens of thousands of women in North America suffer from Chagas disease during their pregnancy and several thousand give birth to infected newborns. But there are at least five other NTDs affecting millions of people in the U.S.—most of whom live way below the U.S. poverty line, voiceless and forgotten. NTDs can occur among immigrants, but there is increasing evidence that it is also homegrown. This is a domestic crisis, not an import.

Like Dr. Hotez, I have struggled with how to best get the word out about our need to address NTDs and their link to poverty. Now he has provided us all with a remarkable tool, a book for people without an extensive scientific or medical background. Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases is an excellent “one-stop” primer about NTDs. The book highlights the most common and devastating NTDs across the world and describes how they simultaneously cause disease and poverty. It also highlights recent global efforts to control, or in some cases to forever eliminate, these diseases using mass treatments with drugs being donated by major pharmaceutical companies and delivered through a network of health ministries, teachers, and community drug distributors. Today hundreds of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries are being treated annually for their NTDs.

Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases also demonstrates how nonprofit product development partnerships (PDPs) are developing new medicines and vaccines for NTDs and how these PDPs are changing conventional notions of business models to develop pharmaceutical products for the world’s poor. The playbook for how to make new NTD medicines and vaccines is being written now, and possibly over the next decade we might have a dozen or more new interventions available. The fact that many of these new medicines are being jointly developed by scientists from the U.S. or Europe in collaboration with developing country scientists from Brazil, India, and elsewhere suggests new opportunities for what Dr. Hotez refers to as “vaccine diplomacy.” Our new Office of Global Health Diplomacy in the U.S. Department of State may soon have unprecedented opportunities to use science innovations as tools for U.S. foreign policy.

The next few years could be exciting ones for the fight against NTDs, but only if the global health policymakers prioritize these diseases alongside better known ones such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer, and heart disease. In this respect, I believe Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases can become an important educational instrument and ultimately an ally in the fight against disease and poverty.

Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases is an enormous contribution to making people in the U.S. aware that neglected tropical diseases are destroying the lives of poor people, not just in the world but in this country, who have no voice or advocate. This book gives the 5 million people suffering in this country both a voice and an advocate in Dr. Hotez. Count me in as another advocate, and someone who will spread the word. Once you’ve read Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases, you can be the next.

Soledad O’Brien

CNN