Tropical Disease News and Research

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Tropical diseases encompass all diseases that occur solely, or principally, in the tropics. In practice, the term is often taken to refer to infectious diseases that thrive in hot, humid conditions, such as malaria, leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, Chagas disease, African trypanosomiasis, and dengue.

UC San Diego researchers receive NIH grant to test efficacy of Sanofi's pain drug in treating Chagas disease

The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded James McKerrow, MD, PhD, director of the University of California, San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, with a 2015 New Therapeutic Uses Award.

23 Jul 2015

New article highlights learnings gleaned from monitoring complex HIV clinical trials in Africa

A new article in Clinical Investigation highlights the learnings gleaned from monitoring several complex HIV clinical trials in Africa over a 15 year period.

2 Jul 2015

WHO/UNICEF: Lack of progress on water and sanitation threatens to undermine child survival, health benefits

Lack of progress on sanitation threatens to undermine the child survival and health benefits from gains in access to safe drinking water, warn WHO and UNICEF in a report tracking access to drinking water and sanitation against the Millennium Development Goals.

1 Jul 2015

Artemisinin and the fight against malaria: an interview with Dr. Robert Sebbag, Sanofi

Since 2014, more than 16 million anti-malarial treatments derived from the Sanofi patented process for semi-synthetic artemisinin have been supplied to endemic countries in Africa.

From Sanofi 28 Jun 2015

Study finds that Amazon river boats provide first-class ride for dengue mosquitoes

The urban mosquito that carries the dengue fever virus is hitching rides on river boats connecting the Amazonian town of Iquitos, Peru, with rural areas.

17 Jun 2015

New ground-breaking initiative aims to find new treatments for leishmaniasis and Chagas disease

The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative and four pharmaceutical firms, Eisai Co Ltd, Shionogi & Co Ltd, Takeda Pharmaceutical Ltd, and AstraZeneca plc have announced the start of a ground-breaking initiative to accelerate and cut the cost of early stage drug discovery for two of the world’s most neglected diseases, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.

30 May 2015

Liverpool scientists complete genomics studies on multidrug resistant Typhoid fever in Africa

The team has completed two genomics studies on the tropical disease, a condition that is estimated to cause up to 30 million illnesses and over a quarter of a million deaths globally each year.

27 May 2015

Chancellor Angela Merkel calls for new plan to tackle Ebola outbreak at 68th World Health Assembly

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany addressed delegates on the first morning of the Sixty-eighth World Health Assembly. "The WHO is the only international organization that has universal political legitimacy on global health issues,” she said.

20 May 2015

Researchers discover potential mechanism to combat haemorrhagic diseases

A potential mechanism to combat diseases caused by haemorrhagic fever viruses has been discovered by researchers at the University of Montreal's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine. These diseases present a dramatic risk to human health as they often spread quickly and kill a high percentage of infected individuals, as demonstrated by the recent Ebola outbreaks.

11 May 2015

Papers on antibiotic resistance, neglected diseases and future of the ocean to be discussed during G7 summit

Today the national science academies of the G7 countries handed three statements to their respective heads of government for discussion during the G7 summit at Schloss Elmau in early June 2015. The papers on antibiotic resistance, neglected and poverty-related diseases, and the future of the ocean were drawn up by the seven national academies under the aegis of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

30 Apr 2015

WHO calls on global health community to address significant gaps in prevention, treatment of malaria

WHO is calling on the global health community to urgently address significant gaps in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of malaria. Despite dramatic declines in malaria cases and deaths since 2000, more than half a million lives are still lost to this preventable disease each year.

23 Apr 2015

Insect-borne diseases increase with warmer climate

Insects, such as mosquitoes and ticks, are responsible for transmitting a range of diseases, such as malaria, chikungunya, dengue fever, and West Nile virus. The risk of contracting such illnesses is generally only considered when booking an exotic holiday. However, experts from the Emergency Response Department at Public Health England have warned that climate change could allow such vector-borne diseases to emerge closer to home.

23 Mar 2015

Case Western Reserve professor urges action to eliminate yaws

Half a century ago, a concentrated global effort nearly wiped a disfiguring tropical disease from the face of the earth. Now, says Case Western Reserve's James W. Kazura, MD, it's time to complete the work.

20 Mar 2015

Researchers assess effectiveness of point of care tests for detecting Schistosomiasis infections

Researchers from the Cochrane Infectious Disease Group, hosted at LSTM, have conducted an independent review to assess how well point of care tests detect Schistosoma infections in people living in endemic regions.

12 Mar 2015

Scientists sequence genome of hookworm

In an advance that may potentially lead to new treatments for parasitic hookworms, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Cornell University have sequenced the genome of the hookworm, Ancylostoma ceylanicum.

3 Mar 2015

Researchers reveal how malaria parasite deploys genetic trickery to escape immune system attack

Up to one million people -- mainly pregnant woman and young children -- are killed each year by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, which causes the most devastating form of human malaria.

26 Feb 2015

WHO urges affected countries to increase investment in tackling neglected tropical diseases

WHO urges affected countries to scale up their investment in tackling 17 neglected tropical diseases in order to improve the health and well-being of more than 1.5 billion people. This investment would represent as little as 0.1% of current domestic expenditure on health in affected low and middle income countries for the period 2015-2030.

19 Feb 2015

Scientists identify potential target to combat leishmaniasis

Research led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists has identified a potential target in the quest to develop a more effective treatment for leishmaniasis, a parasitic tropical disease that kills thousands and sickens more than 1 million people worldwide each year.

19 Feb 2015

Increase in Lassa fever cases could be due to human-to-human transmission, research reveals

One in five cases of Lassa fever - a disease that kills around 5,000 people a year in West Africa - could be due to human-to-human transmission, with a large proportion of these cases caused by 'super-spreaders', according to research published today in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

16 Jan 2015

Penn, UGA scientists awarded new contract to develop genome database for microbial pathogens

At the turn of the millennium, the cost to sequence a single human genome exceeded $50 million, and the process took a decade to complete. Microbes have genomes, too, and the first reference genome for a malaria parasite was completed in 2002 at a cost of roughly $15 million. But today researchers can sequence a genome in a single afternoon for just a few thousand dollars. Related technologies make it possible to capture information about all genes in the genome, in all tissues, from multiple individuals.

18 Dec 2014