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Community-Based Interventions for the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases of Poverty

Edited by: Dr Johannes Sommerfeld, Prof. Xiao-Nong Zhou

Effective and simple interventions and tools exist that can be used to either prevent, treat or rehabilitate patients suffering from infectious diseases of poverty (IDoP). The delivery of these interventions and tools to the affected populations, however, has proven difficult due to weak public health systems in many disease-endemic countries. Disease control and public health programmes are increasingly advocating community-based delivery strategies and interventions. These depend, to a large degree, on trained community volunteers, e.g., community health workers whose performance in various areas of health care such as maternal and child health has been the subject of rigorous recent systematic reviews. Community-based delivery platforms are increasingly being proposed not only to ensure sustainability and combat co-infections, but also to build capacity for integration of NTDs with existing malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS programs for which more sophisticated healthcare delivery systems already exist. This thematic series of eight papers commissioned by the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR), with funding support from the European Commission, provides an overview on infectious diseases of poverty and integrated community-based interventions, describes the analytical framework and the methodology used to guide the systematic reviews, reports findings for the effectiveness of community-based interventions for the prevention and control of helminthic NTDs, non-helminthic NTDs, malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis and proposes a way forward. While previous reviews focus on process and effectiveness of integrated community-based interventions under real life field conditions, this series of papers evaluates the efficacy of such interventions with respect to disease or prevention outcomes.

  1. This series evaluates the effectiveness of community-based interventions (CBIs) to prevent and control infectious diseases of poverty (IDoP). Evidence from our reviews suggests that CBIs and school-based deliv...

    Authors: Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Rehana A Salam, Jai K Das and Zohra S Lassi
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:28
  2. In 2012, an estimated 8.6 million people developed tuberculosis (TB) and 1.3 million died from the disease. With its recent resurgence with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV); TB prevention and management ...

    Authors: Ahmed Arshad, Rehana A Salam, Zohra S Lassi, Jai K Das, Imama Naqvi and Zulfiqar A Bhutta
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:27
  3. In 2012, an estimated 35.3 million people lived with HIV, while approximately two million new HIV infections were reported. Community-based interventions (CBIs) for the prevention and control of HIV allow incr...

    Authors: Rehana A Salam, Sarah Haroon, Hashim H Ahmed, Jai K Das and Zulfiqar A Bhutta
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:26
  4. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness of community-based interventions (CBIs) for the prevention and management of malaria. We conducted a systematic review and identified 42 studies for inclusio...

    Authors: Rehana A Salam, Jai K Das, Zohra S Lassi and Zulfiqar A Bhutta
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:25
  5. In this paper, we aim to systematically analyze the effectiveness of community based interventions (CBI) for the prevention and control of non-helminthic diseases including dengue, trypanosomiasis, chagas, lei...

    Authors: Jai K Das, Rehana A Salam, Ahmed Arshad, Hasina Maredia and Zulfiqar A Bhutta
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:24
  6. In this paper, we aim to systematically analyze the effectiveness of community-based interventions (CBIs) for the prevention and control of helminthiasis including soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH) (ascaria...

    Authors: Rehana A Salam, Hasina Maredia, Jai K Das, Zohra S Lassi and Zulfiqar A Bhutta
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:23
  7. This paper describes the conceptual framework and the methodology used to guide the systematic reviews of community-based interventions (CBIs) for the prevention and control of infectious diseases of poverty (...

    Authors: Zohra S Lassi, Rehana A Salam, Jai K Das and Zulfiqar A Bhutta
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:22
  8. Infectious diseases of poverty (IDoP) disproportionately affect the poorest population in the world and contribute to a cycle of poverty as a result of decreased productivity ensuing from long-term illness, di...

    Authors: Zulfiqar A Bhutta, Johannes Sommerfeld, Zohra S Lassi, Rehana A Salam and Jai K Das
    Citation: Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2014 3:21