Neglected tropical diseases are often associated with social exclusion as well as physical suffering. One billion people around the world suffer from these diseases.
In the heat of the summer, time can sometimes appear like it’s melting away. However, our body clock is there to keep track of the hours gone by.
Joseph Jacobs, Shutterstock
Every year, 1.7 billion people, most in the world’s poorest areas, are affected by NTDs. The diseases cause suffering, stigma, disability and sometimes death.
A case of advanced liver pathology (hepatomegaly) due to schistosomiasis in a 5-year-old.
Prof Takafira Mduluza
Progress against neglected tropical diseases is now at real risk of reversal as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
New variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, arise through mutations when the virus replicates in an infected host’s cells.
(NIAID, cropped from original)
COVID-19 variants are the products of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They arise via mutations, but other forces also have roles to play in the generation and transmission of variants.
A laboratory technician patient samples at the Amudat Hospital, Uganda. Laboratories are central to the delivery of high quality data in clinical trials.
Paul Kamau
This insect’s unique reproductive biology could lead to new ways to control the species in the environment – and prevent the deadly sleeping sickness it spreads to people.
Tsetse flies can pass on African sleeping sickness.
Shutterstock
Elisha Bayode Are, South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling & Analysis (SACEMA) and John Hargrove, South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling & Analysis (SACEMA)
Mathematical modelling tools may predict where tsetse flies are being driven to extinction.
The Tsetse fly which spreads African sleeping sickness.
Oregon State University
A new finding may shed light on how sleeping sickness has avoided elimination and could help finally beat the deadly disease.
A father reads to his son while sitting under a mosquito net. Mosquitoes have undergone evolutionary changes due to long-lasting insecticide-treated nets.
Georgina Goodwin and Vestergaard Frandsen
Although there have been global efforts to eliminate parasites, some parasites and vectors will have survived attack because they have evolved resistance.
Popular characters such as Sleeping Beauty illustrate our enduring interest in tales of people who sleep continuously or cannot stay awake.
Sofi/flickr
Perhaps because we all need sleep, we have an enduring interest in sleep disorders such as narcolepsy, which causes a constant irrepressible need for sleep.
Modern cattle in Kenya.
Steven Goldstein, Washington University St. Louis
New research upends the previous theory that tsetse flies – and the disease they carry – were the main reason the spread of livestock domestication in Africa stalled out for a thousand years.
After a decade of research, an international team decoded the genes of the tsetse fly – the transmitter of trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness. Human trypanosomiasis is a widespread tropical disease…
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