Guest Edited by Robert Bergquist, Adrian Hopkins and Xiao-Nong Zhou
Background
The concept of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) emerged more than a decade ago and has been recognized as a way to identify diseases that affect the poorest individuals in the world, preventing needless suffering and lifting more than 1 billion people out of poverty. Inspired by the roadmap for control, elimination and eradication of NTDs, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2011, global health leaders signed The London Declaration in 2012, which represents an unprecedented commitment to control or eliminate 10 diseases by the end of this decade. Targeting significant NTDs for elimination is part of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal (2015-2030), which is linked with a crucial component of universal health coverage and conceptualized as “leaving no one behind”. The last decade has seen a mixed picture when it comes to success stories in the progress to control or eliminate the world’s NTDs. However, there is great hope that it should be possible to eliminate a group of at least five NTDs within a few years, with continued significant gains for at least six other NTDs. However, for roughly an equal number of other diseases, some of the vector-borne and zoonotic NTDs in particular, progress has been minimal and in some cases activities have stalled or even lost ground.
Global eradication is not only as a vision, but a realistic, long-term objective. Among important NTDs targeted are blinding trachoma, leprosy, human African trypanosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, rabies, endemic treponematoses (yaws), Chagas disease, visceral leishmaniasis, onchocerciaisis and schistosomiasis.
Objectives
To update on the progress and challenges in NTD elimination from different geographic settings, we are organizing this thematic series "Elimination of neglected tropical diseases" in Infectious Diseases of Poverty.
We have invited a few ourstanding experts in this field to contribute research and review articles to the series. We also welcome submissions from our authors and readers. Both research and review articles will be considered, and the manuscripts will go through standard peer review.
Timeline
The deadline for submissions is March 31st, 2018. To submit your manuscript, please use our online submission system, and indicate in your cover letter that you would like the manuscript to be considered for this thematic series.