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Every article we have published on Neglected Tropical Diseases, newest first.
Genomic sequencing identified Haemophilus ducreyi — a bacterium known for a sexually transmitted infection — behind roughly 403 cases in children. Of 156 swabs tested, 61.5% were positive; no yaws was found.
A national survey of more than 120,000 children put combined prevalence at 5.4% and heavy-intensity infection below WHO's 1% elimination threshold, after ten years of preventive chemotherapy.
Varespladib, given on top of antivenom in a randomised trial in India and the USA, did not beat placebo. But it reached patients seven hours after the bite, and the authors say that timing may be the story.
A new model built on rare donor-transmitted infections estimates China detected 29% and the United States 6% of their rabies deaths, implying hundreds go uncounted each year even where the disease seems rare.
In the TESEO trial, benznidazole for 30 days matched the 60-day standard for clearing the parasite and caused fewer side effects, pointing to a gentler regimen for a neglected disease.
Bangladesh was validated in 2023 as the first country to eliminate visceral leishmaniasis as a public health problem; India is nearing the same threshold, even as post-kala-azar skin cases climb.
Human cases are a rounding error against the 3.5 million of the 1980s. But 684 animal infections, most of them dogs in Chad, now stand between the programme and eradication.
A single infusion of a pan-serotype monoclonal antibody cut viraemia and shortened fever in a 250-patient phase 2 trial in India — the first therapy to show preliminary efficacy against wild-type dengue in people.
WHO validated Bhutan's elimination of dog-transmitted human rabies, a disease almost always fatal once symptoms appear. The country has recorded zero such deaths since June 2023.
WHO validated Timor-Leste's elimination of trachoma, the last suspected focus in its South-East Asia Region. A 2025 survey of 4,949 young children found no transmission requiring intervention.
Tungiasis, on WHO's neglected-disease list since 2021 but never quantified, costs up to 379,645 healthy life-years a year — rising to 575,298 once its complications are counted.
National surveillance shows no decline from 2020 to 2024, with one in five patients already disabled at diagnosis — a marker of late detection even as the global burden falls.
A geostatistical re-estimate puts the global toll at 2.1 million envenomings and 274,000 deaths a year at minimum, with African incidence nearly three times South Asia's — against a short antivenom supply.
Among 17,508 notified cases from 2007 to 2021, 1.49% died of Chagas and 5.83% of other causes — with digestive complications, not cardiac ones, carrying the highest cumulative risk.
Sixteen years of PCR-confirmed data show Buruli ulcer incidence down nearly 80%. Over the same period open water surfaces shrank 25–30% and mean air temperature rose by more than 1°C.
A peer-reviewed account traces the mass screening and tsetse-fly control that cut gambiense sleeping sickness below one case per 10,000 in endemic areas — the threshold WHO validated in January 2025.
The surveillance behind the WHO-verified milestone is now published: no infective blackflies at any monitored site, and no infection among 16,406 children tested.
Household cure rates were 88.5 percent with permethrin against 71.8 percent with ivermectin. The trial set out to show ivermectin was non-inferior and found the opposite.
WHO validated Egypt as the 27th country to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. Its programme began in 2002; the disease still blinds or impairs about 1.9 million people elsewhere.
The experimental recombinant antivenom outperformed a plasma-derived product in mice and cut tissue necrosis. It has not been tested in a single human, and the paper does not address cost or manufacturing at scale.