Surveillance and response represent the final crucial steps in achieving effective control and particularly elimination of communicable diseases as recognized in the area of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), applied in increasing numbers in endemic countries with ongoing control and elimination programmers. More and more national NTD elimination initiatives are scheduled based on the innovati...

INTRODUCTION Leprosy is caused by Mycobacterium leprae and manifests as damage to the skin and peripheral nerves. The disease is dreaded because it causes deformities, blindness and disfigurement. Worldwide, 2 million people are estimated to be disabled by leprosy. Multidrug therapy is highly effective in curing leprosy, but treating the nerve damage is much more difficult. The World Health Ass...

leprosy is a rare but important infectious disease caused by mycobacterium leprae . word health organization suggested a strategy to reduce the prevalence of the disease to less than one per 10000 people. it seems that the leprosy is now in its elimination stage because during a period of ten years only few new cases were found in iran. we studied 157 new leprosy cases that were referred to and...

Can leprosy be eliminated? This paper considers the question against the background of the WHO programme to eliminate leprosy. In 1991 the World Health Assembly set a target of eliminating leprosy as a public health problem by 2000. Elimination was defined as reaching a prevalence of < 1 case per 10 000 people. The elimination programme has been successful in delivering highly effective antibio...

With less than four years to reach the elimination target for trachoma, we need to tackle this preventable disease head-on. Through the powerful unity of the Alliance for GET2020, there is global commitment to eliminating a disease that has existed for thousands of years. According to data released in April, around 200 million people are at risk of trachoma, 1.2 million people are blind and 3.6...

Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), also known as Sleeping Sickness, has been one of the most important human diseases in Africa because of widespread epidemics in the past, its very high level of mortality, and its negative influence on the development of rural populations. Two forms of the disease exist, one chronic form in West and Central Africa caused by Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (.95%...

The control of the vector-borne transmission of Chagas disease in Brazil was organized as a national program in 1975, when two large entomological and sero-epidemiological surveys were conducted in the country in order to identify areas at highest risk of transmission and to guide interventions regarding the chemical treatment of domestic vectors of the disease. The authors present the baseline...

The mechanisms behind Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are largely unknown. The disease is to a large extent hereditary, and the best pathophysiological correlate to the severity of the symptoms is loss of synapses. The general aim of this thesis was to examine the hypothesis that AD is primarily a synaptic disease – with an emphasis on complement-mediated elimination of synapses. Animal models of AD h...

From an epidemiological point of view, Chagas disease and its reservoirs and vectors can present the following characteristics: (i) enzooty, maintained by wild animals and vectors, with broad occurrence from southern United States of America (USA) to southern Argentina and Chile (42ºN 49ºS), (ii) anthropozoonosis, when man invades the wild ecotope and becomes infected with Trypanosoma cruzi fro...