IDEA Forum (Dr Dirk Engels)

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Topic: Global response to local poverty-related disease priorities 

Speaker: Dr Dirk Engels, Global Health Consultant, Senior Adviser to Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, China CDC

Related article

Engels, D., Zhou, X. Neglected tropical diseases: an effective global response to local poverty-related disease priorities. Infect Dis Poverty 9, 10 (2020).

Related article collection

Economic Impacts of Infectious Diseases of Poverty

About the speaker

Dr Dirk Engels is a Global Health Consultant, Senior Adviser to Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases, and Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shanghai, PR China. He is a medical doctor, with additional diplomas in tropical medicine and hygiene, epidemiology, a master’s degree in health services research, and a PhD in parasitology. During the first 16 years of his professional career he worked in Africa, successively in clinical tropical medicine, public health, and tropical disease control, in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Rwanda and Senegal, mostly serving people in poor rural settings. In 1998 he joined the World Health Organization (WHO) where he was instrumental in developing WHO’s strategy to fight (NTDs) and in defining norms and standards for the implementation of integrated large-scale preventive treatment interventions. As Director of the Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases, he steered the global expansion of interventions for the control and elimination of NTDs. Dr Engels has authored or co-authored well over a hundred publications in international peer-reviewed journals. He retired from WHO at the end of 2017.