- World Health Organization (WHO) will start a program to battle 20 diseases that change the world’s deprived people’s lives.
- The WHO plan includes eliminating at least one of the 20 recognized NTDs in at least 90 countries by 2030.
- It is trying to check progress obliterated by the force of COVID-19 on healthcare systems.
ThenNewsDesk: On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) will start a program to battle 20 diseases that change the lives of the world’s deprived people, trying to check progress obliterated by the force of COVID-19 on healthcare systems.
Many of the 20 forgotten tropic diseases (NTDs), which vary from leprosy to rabies, have been exterminated in the advanced world; still, they affect more than 1.7 billion people in under-developed countries.
Mwele Malecela, the WHO’s in an evaluation piece for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, stated, “The one thing they (COVID-19 and NTDs) have in common is that they disproportionately affect the poorest and most vulnerable communities in the world.”
Malecela, director of the WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases, stated, “Their impact is felt more often than not by the very people who are least equipped to bear the burden of suffering and disability, not to mention the profound social and economic burdens of disease.”
The WHO plan includes eliminating at least one of the 20 recognized NTDs in at least 90 countries by 2030.
It tries to make drugs secure and accessible and target the mosquitoes, flies and ticks that spread some NTDs. It cuts the number of people demanding medical treatment for diseases by 90 percent over the following 10 years.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) lauded past gains but warned the pandemic could reverse much of the last decade’s progress.
Christos Christou, the medical charity’s president, stated, “NTDs almost exclusively affect people living in extreme poverty.”
“As a result, there are no vaccines, diagnostic tools are limited, and treatments are far from optimal and often unavailable or unaffordable for many of these deadly and debilitating diseases.”
Source- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-who-disease-trfn-idUSKBN29X1HD
