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Economic Impacts of Infectious Diseases of Poverty

Guest edited by Dirk Engels and Xiao-Nong Zhou

A thematic series in Infectious Diseases of Poverty.

econimic impacts

The excellent work in demonstrating how treating children from Western Kenya with deworming tablets benefits their health, improves school performance and education, as well as employment opportunities later in life, conducted by Dr. Michael Kremer who is one of the Nobel Prize winners in Economic Sciences 2019 “for their experimental approach to alleviating poverty”, has trigged more health-economic research, and has encouraged efforts to promote the global deworming programme to control neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).

The end of the NTD epidemic has been listed as one of the indicators to measure the success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because NTD control is highly related to poverty alleviation which is the first goal of the SDGs. Since the World Health Organization’s NTD roadmap and the London Declaration to control and eliminate NTDs were issued in 2012, more attention has been paid by all UN member countries and the international community to research on and implementation of deworming programmes. Therefore, this special issue is trying to promote more research on economic impact assessment to illustrate that poverty alleviation programmes in developing countries will not be successful without eliminating NTDs. At the same time, it will generate good case studies in economic impact assessment of NTDs to illustrate how research on infectious diseases of poverty can accelerate progress towards Universal Health Coverage and the SDGs.

  1. Socioeconomic status (SES) inequity was recognized as a driver of some certain infectious diseases. However, few studies evaluated the association between SES and the burden of overall infections, and even few...

    Authors: Xiangyu Ye, Yidi Wang, Yixin Zou, Junlan Tu, Weiming Tang, Rongbin Yu, Sheng Yang and Peng Huang
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2023 12:5
  2. The economic impact of schistosomiasis and the underlying tradeoffs between water resources development and public health concerns have yet to be quantified. Schistosomiasis exerts large health, social and fin...

    Authors: Daniele Rinaldo, Javier Perez-Saez, Penelope Vounatsou, Jürg Utzinger and Jean-Louis Arcand
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2021 10:134
  3. Implementation of control programmes for Strongyloides stercoralis infection is among the targets of the World Health Organization Roadmap to 2030. Aim of this work was to evaluate the possible impact in terms of...

    Authors: Dora Buonfrate, Lorenzo Zammarchi, Zeno Bisoffi, Antonio Montresor and Sara Boccalini
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2021 10:76
  4. The damage inflicted by the coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic upon humanity is and will continue to be considerable. Unprecedented progress made in global health over the past 20 years has reverted...

    Authors: John P. Ehrenberg, Jürg Utzinger, Gilberto Fontes, Eliana Maria Mauricio da Rocha, Nieves Ehrenberg, Xiao-Nong Zhou and Peter Steinmann
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2021 10:2
  5. India reports the highest number of tuberculosis (TB) cases worldwide. Poverty has a dual impact as it increases the risk of TB and exposes the poor to economic hardship when they develop TB. Our objective was...

    Authors: Mihir P. Rupani, Adithya Cattamanchi, Priya B. Shete, William M. Vollmer, Sanjib Basu and Jigna D. Dave
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2020 9:144
  6. Despite the availability of free tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis and treatment, TB care still generates substantial costs that push people into poverty. We investigated out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for TB care and...

    Authors: Yan Liu, Cai-Hong Xu, Xiao-Mo Wang, Zhen-Yu Wang, Yan-Hong Wang, Hui Zhang and Li Wang
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2020 9:14