Don’t lose focus on diseases of poverty in COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

Scientists in Africa, Asia and Europe from a range of disciplines have been researching these diseases of poverty as part of Zoonoses and Emerging Livestock Systems (ZELS), a United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and UK Research and Innovation funded programme. Managing zoonoses A finding that treating cattle with insecticides to combat ticks and tsetse flies can contain the risk of sleeping sickness in people offers the possibility of simple and cost-effective disease-management strategies. Discovering that the majority of schistosomiasis transmission and sickness in Senegal and Niger is driven not by a human schistosome species, as had been previously assumed, but through schistosome species from people and their livestock combining to form highly transmissible viable parasitic hybrids, has helped ensure the WHO embraces a One Health approach to eliminating of a disease that infects more than 240 million people globally.