At the Clinton Global Initiative today, the Inter-American Development Bank joined with the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases to announce their commitment to mobilize $30 million from the public and private sectors to raise awareness and funding for NTD control and elimination in the Americas, supported by technical assistance from the Pan American Health Organization, regional office of the World Health Organization for the Americas. [More]

An analysis published August 25 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases sheds new light on the toll that neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) take on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with an estimated 500 million people suffering from these debilitating and sometimes deadly diseases. [More]

Researchers have sequenced the genomes of two parasites that cause bilharzia or schistosomiasis - a disease transmitted by water-borne snails that affects more than 200 million people worldwide - "revealing potential weaknesses that could be exploited by drug developers," Nature reports (Smith, 7/15). [More]

The Economist examines schistosomiasis in China. The disease, which is also called snail-fever, is the "world’s second-most prevalent tropical disease after malaria, affecting 207 million people of whom 726,000 are Chinese, according to the most recent official figures, from 2004," the Economist reports. [More]

Providing girls in rural Africa with a deworming drug could help reduce the spread of HIV, according to a study recently published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the New York Times reports. [More]

A decade after the conclusion of a schistosomiasis control program in Mali, prevalence of the disease had regressed to pre-intervention levels, according to a study published May 5 in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. [More]

A robot scientist that can make informed guesses about how effective different chemical compounds will be at fighting different diseases could revolutionise the pharmaceutical industry by developing more effective treatments more cheaply and quickly than current methods. [More]

Scientists are looking to outer space for help in their attempt to prevent new outbreaks of the tropical disease schistosomiasis in southern China. [More]

Egg secretions from a worm that causes a deadly human disease may prove useful in gene therapy, according to research presented at the British Pharmaceutical Conference (BPC) in Manchester. [More]

In 2000 the World Health Organization (WHO) stopped recommending metrifonate for treating urinary schistosomiasis because the drug did not appear to be as effective as the treatment of choice, praziquantel. [More]

An opportunity to contribute to a major initiative to alleviate poverty in the world's poorest populations. [More]

An international team of tropical disease control experts has urged the global health and development community, and particularly the G8 leaders, to establish a new financing mechanism to combat the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) of poverty. [More]

Sixty-two per cent of Africans do not have access to an improved sanitation facility -- a proper toilet -- which separates human waste from human contact, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. [More]

A new genetic analysis, published March 19th in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, suggests that the parasitic worm Schistosoma mekongi is more widespread than previously thought. [More]

A research team supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has identified chemical compounds that hold promise as potential therapies for schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide. [More]