The Return of Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Gulf

Over the past few years, researchers have found that the Gulf region has seen an increase in a dangerous kind of illness: neglected tropical diseases. According to the Center for Disease Control, these diseases "are a group of parasitic and bacterial diseases that cause substantial illness for more than one billion people globally. Affecting the world's poorest people, NTDs impair physical and cognitive development, contribute to mother and child illness and death, make it difficult to farm or earn a living, and limit productivity in the workplace.”

Worldwide, according to the Center for Disease Control, neglected tropical diseases are associated with neglected sanitation, hygiene and inadequate water. They began to receive increased worldwide attention with the outbreak of Ebola last year, which is one of the many dangerous types of NTDs. But long before that, the spread of NTDs had become a big issue in the Gulf Region—according to experts, there’s a perfect mix of risk factors. In 2014, Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, told the Guardian newspaper that a lot of the increase in the Gulf area was based on factors not so different from what’s made populations vulnerable worldwide—a confluence of "poverty, warm climate and the fact that we’ve got the vectors here that transmit the diseases.”

What frustrated him, he added to the newspaper, was that he didn’t believe there was enough attention being paid to the connections between the diseases and economic conditions in the region. "Poverty takes many tolls,” he wrote in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Times, "but in the United States, one of the most tragic has been its tight link with a group of infections known as tropical diseases, which we ordinarily think of as confined to developing countries.”

According to Hotez, in addition to poverty and poor living conditions, there is also a connection between some of the neglected tropical diseases and maternal and child health. In an article published in 2014, he wrote that there are "an estimated 40,000 pregnant North American women who are Trypanosoma cruzi seropositive and at risk of transmitting the parasite to their babies” and recommended increasing evaluation and awareness of the disease—as well as dengue—in pregnant women.

"There is a severe lack of physician awareness about how to manage and treat neglected tropical diseases and an equally urgent need to develop new or better drugs and vaccines,” he added. One important resource in the Slidell area are the women and children’s services at Slidell Memorial. The hospital has decades of experience working with mothers and mothers-to-be with the best pre and post-natal care.

For more than a decade, there have been efforts to raise awareness and prevent the spread of NTDs. One of the better known NTDs is West Nile virus, which can cause anything from the equivalent of a summer cold to encephalitis—deadly especially in vulnerable populations. As early as 2002, an outbreak of West Nile-related encephalitis was reported in Slidell and its surrounding communities. According to a study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the disease was spread among certain types of birds but widely curtailed with mosquito control efforts deployed in the region during the months following the encephalitis outbreak. During that outbreak, Slidell Memorial worked with the Center for Disease Control to identify cases of West Nile in patients.

Like many diseases and outbreaks, one of the most important keys in keeping a region healthy is access to quality health care, which can help treat and prevent outbreaks of dangerous new—and well known—types of diseases. For patients who think they may have an NTD or are at risk for one, it’s important to continue professional medical treatment—and for those populations who can’t afford professional treatment or simply don’t have access to medical treatment regularly, it’s important to increase that access through efforts like community programs.