The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently launched the Expanded Special Project for Elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases (ESPEN), which focuses on five common Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), namely onchocerciasis (river blindness), lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminths and trachoma.
According to WHO, about one billion people around the world are afflicted by the NTDs and 40 per cent of the global burden of the NTDs is in Africa including Ghana. These diseases destroy lives, prevent children from going to school and keep communities in cycles of poverty.
NTDs are preventable and treatable diseases that place constant and heavy burden on the poorest, most marginalised and most isolated communities around the world. Though not killer diseases, over the years, they sap people’s strength, destroy their quality of life and put holes in their pockets in the form of money for treatment each time they are afflicted.
It depends on ones definition of killer disease. WHO statistics show that together, they cause more than 150,000 deaths every year worldwide, yet even that number vastly understates their impact. Yet, these diseases can be controlled and eliminated through mass drug administration, the simple and cheap administration of medicine to all people living in high-risk areas.
Sub-Saharan Africa can save $52 billion between 2011-2030 if the region meets the WHO 2020 targets for controlling or eliminating the NTDs. Ghana alone can save nearly $12 billion and avert the equivalent of over 23 million years of life that would have otherwise been lost to ill health, disability and early death.
Pharmaceutical companies according to the WHO, donate medicine for their treatment, with 1.5 billion of such medicines donated in 2015 alone. Delivering the drugs has, however, been hampered by lack of information on where those affected are, lack of infrastructure to distribute the medicines to remote areas and a system to track progress.
An effort of such scale demands substantial funding and technical capacity, posing a major challenge for many African countries including Ghana.
The battle to eliminate the NTDs, in our view, must be led by affected countries and for us in Ghana, with high poverty rate where constant illness is an everyday reality for many of our people who live in squalid conditions with no access to potable water, health care facilities and poor sanitation habits, we do not have much of an option than key into this, considering that most of the diseases in this category are fuelled and worsened by poverty. Eliminating these diseases would also save the country huge funds as found in the report and such funds could be put to other use.
Ghana as a country must play its role in this regard by providing the necessary counter-part funding and avail itself to benefit from the support the ESPEN has assured it would give to countries each step of the way and support them as they map the burden of these diseases, deliver treatments accurately and efficiently, monitor progress and secure certification when they successfully eliminate diseases from within their borders.
