neglected tropical diseases

A few of the recent pieces I've liked: Laura Ungar in USA TODAY: Found too late: Cancer preys on rural Americans Priya Batra on the Huffington Post blog: Confidentiality Is Key: To Reduce Teen Pregnancy, the U.S. Must Ban Parental Notification Laws for Contraception Henry Wismayer at Vox: I got typhoid. Then dengue fever. Here’s what it taught me about my love of travel. Heather Rogers at The Intercept: Erasing Mossville: How Pollution Killed a Louisiana Town Jamie Smith Hopkins at the Center for Public Integrity: Unequal Risk: Disease victims often shut out of workers’ comp system Amber…

Tropical parasitic diseases may lack the headline-grabbing power of bird flu or SARS and they may fail to grab the pharmaceutical industry's attention. But there is no doubt that they are a massive problem. Schistosomiasis, a disease that many people in Western countries will never have heard of, currently afflicts 3% of the world's population, a staggering 20 million people, and almost four times that number are at risk. Schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia, affects people living across the tropics. It's caused by parasitic flatworms called blood-flukes, belonging to the genus…